Media

I’m typing this on a radio keyboard and I’m cynical as hell because my back’s on fire, and somewhat (read: quite a bit, lol) off my tits on painkillers. With that caveat in mind:

No confidential service should ever provide information publicly that could lead to the identification of its users. Regardless of intentions. I’m sure there are reasonable exceptions and that’s a whole other debate, which is beyond the scope of my current pained keyboard jizz. The recent National Bullying Helpline media ruckus, via its head, Christine Pratt, was started by, essentially, a breach of confidentiality. I won’t recap the affair, I’m sure, unless you’ve given up news, you’re aware of the background.

I don’t think Christine Pratt should be subject to vilification beyond a breach of confidentiality. I don’t think there is much of a story. It was reported, initially, with very few journalists even attempting The Five Ws. The headline should have been “Charity head relates anecdote which may or may not relate to Gordon Brown”.

Gordon Brown could be a massive toss pot, and I’m really not a fan, and wouldn’t vote for him, but in this internets age are anecdotes enough? Is that what constitutes news?

I really can’t attribute any specific blame to journalists, politicians, or people who consume news, but there’s bigger things to address. Like the economy, particularly, the thing that will constrain whichever government is elected. Or minor distractions (at least to me, I’m really not interested in photographing towns and cities, or people – they’re annoying) like photographers being subject to hassle from police under anti-terrorism powers (link via @glinner). Or retarded UK libel laws.

I could segue into some kind of righteous list of stuff that’s more important than anecdotes, but, I don’t know about a lot of things, and, as I have done in the past, would be falling into the trap of talking about complicated things in a simplistic, and somewhat biased way. As is the internets wont.

It could be argued that anecdotes about one of the people in charge of our country are important, that the character of a politician is something we are right to want to know about. Given their personality informs their decisions. My problem with that is that there are a minority of people who are both talented, and arseholes, so judging on personality alone isn’t enough, and can distract from real issues, like the economy, or the police wasting their time with photographers and the like, or other complicated things.

Nick Clegg, and David Cameron did themselves no favours by joining in.

We need a grown up nuanced debate, and what we’ve got is a circus. Professional trolling. Roll on the election. I’m sure it will be very depressing, and I do hope Jeremy Vine gets out his cowboy suit again. Yee har!

As Ben Goldacre has pointed out, programmes for nerds and those with nerdish tendencies, are few and far between on television. The same is true of photography. We live in an age where ownership of photographic tools is widespread.  Camera phones and compact digital cameras are ubiquitous. Many people don’t realise the degree to which, in terms of artistic capability, the type of camera is irrelevant. Good photos are good photos.

Chase Jarvis demonstrates this with his book of iPhone photography: The Best Camera is The One That’s with You (picked up on via Ken Rockwell). Most photographers, in my experience (I’m not a photographer, I’m a hobby master), use particular kit because it makes their job easier, but given a camera phone, or compact digital camera, will produce photographs with artistic merit. Because the greatest common factor between the camera phone or compact, and the professional kit, is the photographer. A pro may require particular professional kit to do their job, but without the underlying skill, it’s irrelevant.

Most, if not all, contemporary technology shows focus on the latest gadgets, rather than what people actually own. It would be a truly wonderful thing if there was a photography show that engages and interacts with an audience, with a particular emphasis on technology that everyone owns. I say interacts because a major part of the show could be viewer submitted pictures.

A magazine format hosted by people with a genuine interest in photography. The show could focus on things common to all photography: lighting, location, composition and colour. So it’s relevant to people regardless of the camera they own. Segments on things like The Rule of Thirds, how time of a day affects a photograph, etc., and, at the end of the show, solicit picture from viewers using things discussed in the programme. Using whatever they have at hand.

There could be segments on professional photography, and photographers. Giving viewers an insight into the world of professional photography. Covering things like fashion photography, commercial photography, wildlife photography, landscape photography, (s)urban photography, paparazzi celebrity photography, and so on. Even photographic history could be examined.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being all old fashioned and Reithian about it. It’d be perfect for the BBC. But I really hope someone commissions a show like that. I claim no ownership of the idea (take it! take it! I have about five to ten ideas a day), it seems obvious to me, and could be talking bollocks. It is, after all, the internet.

At the risk of every written word post on this blog descending into Lee & Herring’s Ironic Review I’m going to write a little about The Jeremy Kyle Show. For readers outside the UK The Jeremy Kyle Show is superficially similar to The Jerry Springer Show, but distilled to pack as much drama as possible into an hour, and a host that takes a strong moral stance. It includes lie detector tests, and DNA paternity tests, regular as a metronome. Recently I saw an episode, for the first time, and watched several others, somewhat agape. Here’s an excerpt on YouTube.

The show’s guests are predominantly poor, uneducated, and with substance abuse problems. The theme is often infidelity, dysfunctional families, and relationships. Both sides of an argument are aired, followed by an exposition vehemently extracted by the host, culminating in the results of a DNA or lie detector test. Many of the guests of The Jeremy Kyle are single parents, often with multiple children one or more of whom’s paternity is uncertain. A recurring theme is teenage pregnancy, drugs, crime, and alcohol.

If William Hogarth were alive today he would be illustrating episodes of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Much like Hogarth’s Gin Lane illustrated deprivation and immorality in England, the show illustrates parts of life in the UK that are very difficult not to view in terms of right and wrong. Most of the bad behaviour exposed on the show is indefensible.

I find it questionable that the show individualises the poor choices of the show’s guests. There’s a huge paradox when a teenage mother is being criticised for stupid choices, and her mother, who is at least as fucked up as the daughter, is brought on stage. Said teenage mother being asked, earnestly by Jeremy Kyle, why she made such stupid choices, while sitting next to her a repugnant and immature person who brought her into the world.

I don’t for a second want to suggest a fucked up background automatically leads to a fucked up life, there are plenty of people who are successful despite of a dysfunctional or traumatic past. It’s an insult to people who’ve surmounted such problems to assume. A fucked up background isn’t a guarantee of a fucked up person, but I’d be willing to bet it helps. Asking an inarticulate, semi-literate, fool “Why did you do it?”, seems redundant when evidence abounds for how difficult it would be not to make stupid decisions with such an upbringing.

If I had to describe the show in one word it would be: Intervention. The show intervenes in messed up lives and attempts to rectify problems. For entertainment purposes and advertising revenue.

It has an after-care team of (I assume) professionals to help solve problems blighting the guests’ lives. Which makes Jeremy Kyle’s moral stance paradoxical. On the one hand reducing the problem to morality soundbites – but, on the other, admitting the complexity of problems, and dealing with them in a reasonable way. The Jeremy Kyle Show itself, rather than the guests, is an indictment of a society that deals with complex social problems in a well funded and suitably complicated way through a television show’s after-care service.

It’s entertaining. Drama is entertaining. Jeremy Kyle is a competent and charismatic host. The guests stories are often so fucked up they elicit grim but frequent lols, of the black humour FFS variety. I wonder if viewers see it as something stupid and wrong but complicated, or stupid and wrong, but reduced to individuals. I hope not. The show has more than enough context. But I have a feeling that it’s about laughing at fools, and the undeserving poor.

There is a very silly American show called Deadliest Warrior.  It compares historical fighters by exploring what their weapons are capable of and  fighting technique.  It’s fun stuff.  Blowing stuff up, chopping stuff up, and testing weapons.  A recent episode explored a fictional Shaka Zulu vs William Wallace scenario.  It culminates with a computer model battle to decide the outcome.  It’s got a veneer of scienciness and a narrator who probably smokes to keep husky.

Problems: There seems to be little no reference to environment.  The first thing I thought when I saw the title of the show was “in what environment?”.   It’s important. Styles of combat are as much affected by geography and logistics as many human endeavours.

How long would William Wallace be able to wield a claymore in South African heat?  How long would someone in traditional Zulu dress cope with Scottish weather? Further to that how are a given warrior’s tactics adjusted to the environment they live in?  What did the warrior do the day before?  Could have marched miles because of inferior strategy.

Superior weapons are a huge part of it.  But to assume inferiority solely on the basis of inferior weapons seems a bit, well, retarded.  Most successful armies, and warriors, have great logistics.  But logistics is boring.  Then there’s strategy and tactics.  Less boring, but complicated.  There’s so many factors involved that would determine something seemingly simple like a one-on-one fight.

Deadliest Warrior is a late night conversation between drunk stereotypical beer advert blokes.  “In a highly unlikely, ideal environment for both sets of combatants, fighting fit, in a one-on-one fight, who would win between He-Man and Lion-O?” without the caveats or references to cartoons.  Essentially comparing deadly warriors (in their environment) in a fictional environment.  It’s like Japanese bug fights.

I still kind of like Deadliest Warrior but then I like a lot of nonsense.  I don’t begrudge the show.  Just people who view it as anything other than entertainment.

I’m watching a mind-fuck via the BBC called “Blood, Sweat, and Takeaways” (it’s on iPlayer). It’s the televisual equivalent of slumming it. Six typical young people are taken to work in developing countries – to work in factories and occupations that sell to the west. First problem is the typical people chosen as the subjects for the show, are naïve, loud, and rude. I’m all for that. Provided it’s funny. It’s not. They’re English Borats. Maybe it’d be funny if I wasn’t English.

I somewhat hope they’ll be mugged. But whatever I hope has no bearing on the subject. To think otherwise is magic thinking, and you’ll go to hell for magic thinking. I know, in theory, the show is good: giving people that don’t read, and have no imagination, an idea of what global consumerism means for people. But in reality it’s just another reality show.

About a bunch of typical people, that apply for a show, are pre-screened, pre-approved, in a fish out of water scenario, acting like twats.

My back hurts, I’m not in an objective and happy place, but feel compelled to write. I was reading Charlie Skelton’s reports from the Bilderberg Conference, near Athens, Greece. I’ve watched and read Jon Ronson’s reporting of the same subject, which was excellent, and set the bar high when it came to objective reporting of the subject. I read Skelton’s pieces with prejudice, and, to be frank, thought they were mildly amusing. The levity with which he covered the subject felt a bit insincere and affected. Until he got arrested.

I’ll declare here that I sort-of agree with the internationalist agenda. I don’t think Bilderberg are inherently evil or a threat to world democracy. I don’t think it’s at all straight-forward. There’s lots of competing centres of powers in the world. The world is as complicated as people, and because of that, conspiracies have a habit of not working, or being a kind of paraeidolia.

However many powerful and/or influential people attend Bilderberg Conferences. I can see why there needs to be privacy. Many of the people attending are, rightly, scrutinised by a partisan and intrusive press. There needs to be outlets where important things can be discussed without press and public scrutiny. Taking decisions behind closed doors is wrong and distinct from discussions behind closed doors. I don’t believe Bilderberg Conferences are about decisions.

Charlie Skelton sounds quite sheltered. He doesn’t strike me as particularly political person, or the kind of person that is particularly streetwise. He’s a stereotypical (I don’t mean this as an insult) middle class humorist reporter. Seems polite, fairly deferential to authority, not overtly or covertly political, isn’t an activist, seems temperate, and not much of a threat.  Maybe, just maybe, a threat to cups of tea, and biscuits, and weeds in his garden.

So, hearing and reading about him getting arrested (three times), put under overt surveillance, and generally harassed by authorities guarding the event, it strikes me as an incredibly twatty and, totally, utterly, pointless, thing. Maybe I’m wrong and The Guardian sent him to angrily micturate, all beered up, at passing limousines, and have him seagull passing dignitaries on the golf course. But I think that is very unlikely.

Instead, the Bilderberg Conference via the Greek police have given ammunition to every conspiracy theory on the internet. Well done Bilderberg. Well done.

Yes. (Clickable)

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Fuck off.  No. Oh FFS.

Remakes are fucked.  Thing is, the only successful remakes are where they change it nearly beyond recognition (the Battlestar Galactica method), or, keep it reasonably close, capturing the essential qualities of the original despite modernisation (The Star Trek Next TNG method). If it’s anywhere in between the two you end up with Carry on Columbus, Star Trek Voyager, and virtually every other remake or spin-off, including some I probably haven’t watched.

Watch for yourself on iPlayer (click No above). If you’re abroad, you’re not missing much. Things to note: colour saturation, audio gain on the laughter track, exaggerated facial expressions, minimal distance between gags and punchlines, Reggie’s pseudo existential angst, the difficulty in suspending belief, on top of a grinding feeling that you’re watching the original as interpreted by idiots.

They’ve used some kind of phaser in the new version of the old theme tune.  That’s almost a metaphor for the show.

Tonight I had a chance to watch Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on BBC 2. It was good.   I don’t like watching old bands doing their old stuff. I don’t know why. I think it could be the people I associate with attending the concerts of old bands doing their old stuff. I’m not opposed to old bands. Or, to an extent, old stuff. But, when a band becomes, in essence, a tribute act, to itself, and gigs are attended by people mindlessly shouting for the band’s radio hits, it’s dull. The best artists put a new spin on their art, to avoid going mad. Or give it a new context.

The same goes for comedians. Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle probably did interesting things and, until tonight, I missed it. Out of the prejudice that people who watched it are like Genesis fans post Phil Collins singing.  Or people shouting things suspiciously like ‘blahblah-blahblah-blah’  to the first ten or so bars of  Bound 4 Da Reload  by Oxide & Neutrino, at an ironic millennium revival party, in Surrey. Dressed like people from the year 2000.  Because they are, and are so mind-numbingly stupid, they need to be reminded of it at fixed intervals.

It’s on iPlayer.  No doubt bittorrent(s) too.

There’s a collection of his previous work (with – here – Richard Herring) here (that will work in the rest of the world). I can’t say I watched him when he was funny, because he’s still funny. I was going to say that he’s never been funny. But couldn’t lie. On the other-hand, as a species, we’re often twats. And with the previous line I hedge my bets.

When I’m in front of the modern day idiot (savant) box, reading the papers, I often have a YouTube video opened in another tab, playing music. While I appreciate the benefits of modern consumerism and globalisation leading to mutual dependence (touch wood*, a bit less war than usual), and wholeheartedly believe in advertising (you get adverts as good as the gits watching them), when a flash animated advert takes up 90% of CPU time it really fucks up music. I now associate certain brands with stuttering music. And newspapers.

You know who you are. In that regard, in my experience, The Guardian is less likely to have browser crippling adverts than other newspaper websites. I’m desperately trying to stretch this out. The this in question being: ’slow flash adverts are annoying’. Everything you’ve read prior to that is irrelevant fluff. You’d think it’d be easy talking bollocks. It isn’t. You have to make a concious effort. I’ve steadily built up an admiration for Jeremy Clarkson. He could stretch slow flash adverts are annoying to at least three A4 pages.

Seriously, I’m just going to look around the room and start typing. German for orange juice is orangen saft. Can’t go much further with that. See. Clarkson’s a fucking genius at talking bollocks. He could get ten A4 pages talking about himself.  A book even. Genius.

Fuck-a-diddly-dee.

I was about to post the above, but then thought, well, Jeremy Clarkson is an easy target. Kind of like standing naked in front of a mirror pointing at your knob and saying something akin to ‘knob lol’. It’s not (that) big and it’s not clever (damn you sentence order). Talking bollocks is an art. Not quite up there with Tacita Dean or (insert ironic, yet apt, choice here). They (Tacita Dean, ironic choice) don’t talk bollocks, they (insert relevant descriptions).

When I met (insert fluff namedrop here) last (insert date) we (tangential anecdote). (Clichéd witticism). (Serious point).

(Stupid fucking concluding paragraph that badly sums up those preceding it, followed by a product or media plug).

At least Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t do that. (Insert bit where I add that he’s still a twat).

* This is a phrase. It’s an appeal to a supernatural force that don’t exist. I am also, bad back bored belligerent,  trolling.

I’ve been reading about the whole Samantha Ronson/Lindsay Lohan split drama. It amazes me that things can get so out of hand. A separation is one thing. It is complex.  Let me explain, for those of you that haven’t kept up with it: In the days leading up to 8th April 2009 it became clear that the Lo-Ro relationship was over. In subsequent days Lo-Ro, respectively, consulted with officials before decamping to opposite sides of LA.

For a while tensions were low. A détente; children played, shops were open, people visited each other, and went about their business. But in secret, taking advantage of the lull, both sides began importing New Forest ponies from the United Kingdom.  At first it seemed innocent.  Pony rides for disadvantaged children, that sort of thing.  Parallel to this they covertly built  training camps in the hills of LA.  Indoctrinating the ponies, re-establishing Emperor worship, beating them half to death, forcing them to fight each other -  so-called beastings, in preparation.

Perez Hilton blamed Lo-Ro’s background in evolutionary biology. We should be careful not to regard this as anything other than speculation. This, we know, on 10th April 2009, approximately seven thousand New Forest ponies, wild eyed, under the influence, fought to the death.

Armed only with broken chair legs strapped to their heads, in what has been called the single most stupid conflict of the 21st Century. According to eyewitnesses West Sunset Boulevard resembled a bad continental abattoir. Several hundred paparazzi escaped unharmed.

Edit:

Since I wrote that Lindsay Lohan has been found guilty of the murder of Simon Cowell, whom she inserted an umbrella into and opened with fatal force. Defense attorneys in the case argued that consent was given. Samantha Ronson has since become a British Airways captain and celebrated baker.

While typing in stutters, peering through a fog of an Albert Steptoe bad back, as if hit with a cricket bat, and appreciating sleep through its absence, I feel compelled to look forward to little things. Today’s little thing could be good, could be bad, but, at the least, will be interesting. Which is something. At 9pm PST The Path is released. Brought into the world by Tale of Tales, creators of The Graveyard – a game that consists of walking a geriatric old dear to a bench, listening to ambience on the way, sitting her down, listening to a contemplative song, and then walking her out. Sometimes she dies, and you have to press Alt-F4 to exit. Lol.

Years ago, at school – a macho boys school – homo and poof were frequent terms of abuse for anything that seemed effeminate or weak. It was primarily driven by a lack of life experience (ignorance), a kind of lazy, ill-thought out, homophobia. Upon leaving school most people, possessing half a brain or more, and a bit of life experience, rapidly realise that people are generally people regardless of their gender. There are copious amounts of stupid people of every gender. It’s the one thing that unites all nationalities. The basic problem with humour derived from gay stereotypes is pretty much the same as humour derived from any other stereotype. Unless it’s ironic, or has some deeper meaning, it’s obvious, and because it’s obvious, it’s retarded.

I could be missing something about Al Murray’s ‘gay’ Nazi, and Horne & Corden’s ‘gay’ war correspondent, because I don’t think any of the comedians in question are homophobic. In Al Murray’s case he’s got a track record of taking the piss out of homophobia in the form of the pub landlord (‘never confused’). But in the case of the ‘gay’ Nazi and the ‘gay’ war correspondent the humour is derived from some pretty negative homosexual stereotypes. This can be contrasted with Sascha Baron Cohen’s Brüno – here for instance – which is essentially about peoples reactions to absurd situations, and absurd stereotypes, rather than a strict play on stereotypes. If people are just laughing at the stereotype then the comedy is retarded.

I’m not homosexual, and I’ve never experienced the kinds of bullying or discrimination that people have, but I have seen how ignorance about other genders can lead to a kind of lazy, semi-malevolent, homophobia. I’m principally opposed to the ‘gay’ Nazi sketch and Horne & Corden’s ‘gay’ war correspondent sketches because I think they’re retarded sketches, aimed at idiots, and lazy, in some very fundamental ways. People forget that in order to be edgy you have to be smart.

Given how thick people are it should do rather well.

FFS.

Possibly.  You have to burn the rope.

At there’s a few US shows that I quite like:  Ghost Hunters International, UFO Hunters, and Hell’s Kitchen.  In Ghost Hunters International a team of everypeople go around the world investigating supposedly haunted places with lots of dubious equipment – like a camera with its IR filter taken out – which they keep referring to as ‘full spectrum’ (it’s not), and, of course, the requisites of any latter day ghost hunt – handicams, closed circuit rigs, digital voice recorders, that sort of thing.

In UFO Hunters three presenters (Bill Burnes – Alien UFO Believer – wears dark glasses indoors, Pat Uskert – UFO believer, Ted Acworth – scientist/sceptic/MythBusters effect beneficiary)  investigate UFO sightings, past and present. Speaking to witnesses, official documents, looking at out of focus videos shot by idiots, and checking for evidence. In Hell’s Kitchen a load of people line up to be sodomised (metaphorically) by Gordon Ramsay in the hopes of winning a job in a restaurant.  And they cook a bit too.

What’s interesting about all three isn’t the content or the subject.  The content and subject of the programmes are delivery mechanisms for the production.  With Ghost Hunters International, and UFO Hunters, the investigations results are usually ambiguous,  a bitch if you want exciting an engaging.  So, almost inevitably, they have exquisitely crafted soundtracks, and suspenseful narration.  Hell’s Kitchen no doubt has its share of in real life drama, but what’s clever is the way that the narrative is formed.

If they didn’t story board it I’d be amazed.   Not because drama didn’t happen, in that sense it’s real, but because they’ve got to convey things concisely as part of an overall narrative.

All three shows have  gone one-step further than old school reality television because the soundtrack is crafted to each situation, which influences the general mood of the content to the point that the content is no longer king.  It’s like selecting paragraphs from a book,  and controlling their new context with an additional narrative driven by the music.  The jarring sound effects on Ghost Hunters International are great, as are the riffs on Hell’s Kitchen.

There’s plenty of other reality shows that are driven by the production, particularly American reality shows, but, Ghost Hunters International and UFO Hunters pretend they’re not  – everything is made to look authentic in an existential sense  – and Hell’s Kitchen is the opposite – it’s very hard to see it as anything other than production driven entertainment, it is so in your face, right down to substantial and dramatic recaps at the start of the show.

All three shows are bollocks.   But that’s not the point.

On your BBC.  It’s not like there’s anything else going on.  A good use of the license fee.  Everyone is affected by knife-crime.  So let’s wheel out grieving relatives of knife crime victims and ask them what they think should be done nationally.

Sure to be as objective as past media treatments, see 5cc here for selected highlights.

I like Christmas.  I even like the churches and the singing and that sort of thing. Generally speaking, at an exceedingly high percentage of the time, people don’t ram their religion down my throat, and I feel the same way about others.  Believe in God?  I don’t.  I also – genuinely, with some gusto – don’t give a flying Dawkins what you chose to believe.  It’s up to you.  It’s not my business.  I have a problem with belief trumping evidence, not personal belief.  I have problems with human faith and politics getting in the way of objectivity.  And  tribalism.  People being dicks transcends religion and ethnicity. We’re all dicks. I hope science and freedom of speech are the best reactions to how rubbish we are at being objective about things.  The problem is not religion.  It’s people.

Merry Christmas.

That said, it’s only recently that it has become OK, in public life, for people to openly admit their atheism without being viewed with suspicion.  Friends who live in America tell me that if you hold any publicly accountable position it is still very difficult to publicly admit to being an atheist. My views are borne out of a society in which it has become OK to admit to alternative religious beliefs.   We owe some seriously annoying people for that.   Where, for the most part, we’re reasonably tolerant of each other. It doesn’t mean all views are equal.   I thought Mary gave birth to Santa until I was six.

Without a public dialogue with all views represented; religious, secular, idiotic, clever, we’re falling into the traps of the past.

Which is why I quite approve of this.

Particularly Ben Goldacre, Richard Herring, Simon Singh, Ricky Gervais, Stuart Lee, and some of the others.  Some of the rest can go fuck themselves.

Ho ho ho.

I’ve never watched X Factor until recently. Naturally, I’ve seen clips via Screenwipe, TV Burp, YouTube etc.   During bad auditions I think it is justified along the same lines as sending first year students on useless errands and treating them like shit, because  you went through the same.  Justifying it as character building.   Because everyone knows that the entertainment industry is brutal, that looks are paramount, that if you’re ugly, and don’t have talent to compensate, you’re fucked.  All of the established celebs involved with talent shows have been through that brutal process (like the perfectly unscathed Britney Spears), and they’re stopping people wasting their lives on improbable dreams.  So they’re doing them a favour.  It’s character building.

After enrolling thousands of participants, it’s OK to put the worst on camera, rather than turn them away, and OK to criticise them on prime time television.   The television experience of a viewer made participant is enough to prepare them for actual television.  It’s not exploitative at all.

Along those lines I think there should be a television show called Broken Dreams.  In which a friendly approachable host takes deluded people on trips to see experts who will brutally shatter their dreams.  They could start off with people of very low intelligence, and work up from delusions to people with diagnoses – and, even better – work their way through every shade of ugly.  I’m sure it would sell well. If they could work their way around to a John Merrick-alike singing Boyzone it’d be wicked cool.

The UK public, being deeply moral, would enjoy watching that, and wouldn’t have to sit through a load of cookie cutter singers to get to the good bits. In ten years time X-Factor will be featured on crap nostalgia clip shows as an example of past crap television. Simon Cowell will be wheeled out of his gold plated nursing home, and he’ll comment in-between clips, as a bemused viewer wonders who he is.

(transition: gets away from the keyboard, eats, comes back to the keyboard)

On the other hand I’m not sure.  To an extent excluding poor, deluded fools from entering X-Factor, is a bit nannyish and patronising.  It could be a genuine wake-up call to stick to the day job.  So, I don’t know.  Maybe Simon Cowell is just being funny and Dermot O’Leary isn’t the anti-Christ.  It all comes down to what bad auditionees think.  And I’m not going to speak for them.  Some of them are nuts.

At least it gets them out of the house.

The current episode of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe is quite special (series 4 episode 3, or series 5 episode 3 if you count from somewhere else, see comments below). During the programme he chats with several prominent UK screen writers about their work. It’s available on iPlayer here, and foreigners will soon find it on YouTube.

I don’t normally like watching things like that episode, because it sometimes reveals a dispassionate professionalism in heroes that tinges the way I see them forever, like they’ve been dipped in the bog of eternal stench. I don’t necessarily want to know the artist to appreciate their art. I’m that childish.

But all of the people in the programme (Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Graham Linehan, Russell T Davies, Paul Abbott, Tony Jordan) came across well, and none of the questions asked by Brooker were stupid in a way that I, as a layman, could detect.

Recently I had a casual conversation with someone about Simon Amstell’s Never Mind The Buzzcocks, which led to a broader discussion about contemporary comedy. I’m of the opinion that Simon Amstell is very funny, and they were of the opinion that Simon Amstell is nasty and picks on people. It’s indicative of a wide gap between the internet generation (it’s not an age thing – it’s an information thing) and everybody else. I have some opinions on ‘modern’ humour. Just like I possess an anus.

Sex and morality – still a big issue for many, there are a whole generation of people that openly discuss issues that were taboo. In part through things like sex education in schools, in part changing attitudes, and in part because of the internet. There are plenty of subjects that people do not consider shock-worthy. Superficially it seems callous, but in my opinion, honesty does not equal not caring.  Humour based on things that were taboo does not cheapen debate, but signifies willingness to talk openly about issues that were considered in bad taste. It’s the inverse of Victorian double standards. People don’t look the other way. In the previous paragraph I placed modern in quote marks because I believe people like Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, later Samuel Butler, countless others, did the same thing (some would say they did it better, and the comparison is disproportionate – I agree  – but the point is about precedents). It’s not new.

Take the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross ruckus – moral decline? In some ways I am glad to live in a country that is still shocked by bad behaviour – the exact opposite of moral decline – on the other-hand I think some of the more vitriolic responses to the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross ruckus were driven by people who are unwilling to talk about sex because they think it’s immoral outside of marriage, which is a shame, because it happens. It happened in the past too . When people point to things like teenage pregnancy rates in the UK as a sign of moral decline, it’s worth noting that among the industrialised nations Japan, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and France, have far lower rates of teenage pregnancy, with attitudes towards sex that are far more open than ours. A willingness to talk about sex does not equal immorality, any more than Victorians not talking about sex equalled morality. Nor does it equal ‘the answer’ – I won’t pretend that I think an unwillingness to talk about sex is the reason for the UK and America’s high teenage pregnancy rates. I have no doubt at all that it’s more complicated than that, and requires impartial inquiry, free of the shackles of mere opinion such as this.

If people were campaigning against Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross because they invaded the privacy of Georgina Baillie (whom seems reasonable and intelligent) I think they’ve got a fair point – but they weren’t – they were complaining about it been ‘grossly offensive’. Not a gross invasion of privacy, or good old fashioned bad manners, but an issue of taste, decency, and morality. Combined with a general sense of anger towards the BBC.

I don’t know many people on my side of the debate who thinks what Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross did was edgy, or anything other than mildly amusing (at best – many people thought it was rubbish – they can both be far funnier), but the reactions to it exposed a divide and a mutual misunderstanding from both sides. As BBC license fee payers those who found the broadcast offensive were absolutely within their rights to complain. But in the rush for judgement many people feel as if their views were ignored because they were not suitably incensed or represented. I felt quite angry about that at the time, and was as rabid, or worse, than the people I criticised. I was wrong and I regret that. Retrospect is a fine thing. Emotions running high do not lead to a quality debate or bode well for free speech.

Honesty being mistaken for nastiness – Simon Amstell’s humour is based on honesty. His stand up and his presenting. When he is picking on some celebrity he doesn’t do so with anything other than the truth. This is no more apparent when a celebrity on Never Mind The Buzzcocks (available on iPlayer here) says something along the lines of ‘yeah – so what’ and the audience applauds. I think this is a natural Twenty First Century reaction to Twentieth Century celebrity. PR, image making, to an extent the machinery of media production, is no longer transparent to the audience, and people like Simon Amstell are a reaction to that. The divide in the opinions of Never Mind The Buzzcocks viewers after the exit of Mark Lamarr exactly mirrors the cultural divide. One could almost get Hegelian about this sort of thing,

Disability and the use of politically incorrect language in satire – there was a bit of a fuss as a result of Simple Jack in the film Tropic Thunder, over the use of the word retarded. Again, I think many people missed the point; in Tropic Thunder Simple Jack was presented as a film that starred Tugg Speedman as a cognitively impaired lad who could talk to animals. It it was presented as a film that bombed (failed miserably at the box-office). The point was that it bombed because Tugg Speedman played ‘the full retard’ – as Kirk Lazarus, method actor extraordinaire, pointed out. People do not want to see people who are greatly cognitively impaired in films, they prefer people like Rain Man or Forest Gump, idealised, sanitised versions of disability. The film was as much a satire of cinema audiences as movies and actors. Everyone picked up on the use of the word retard and a blacked-up Robert Downey Jr (Kirk Lazarus was a satire of stereotypes in method acting), but not what was spelt out by Kirk Lazarus about movie depictions of the cognitively impaired. People were too busy being offended to notice. Tropic Thunder was a great satire. & Tom Cruise was brilliant in it (click here for a tasty morsel, or even better, buy the DVD).

I’ve intermittently wanked on about the credit crunch for quite some time, in many ways it’s been like watching a railway crash, in that there’s been a fixed trajectory, and from a great distance things don’t appear to be moving that fast. I have a couple of comments; firstly, none of the underlying problems with the affected economies have been solved *, and secondly, there aren’t half some head cases that comment on Robert Peston’s blog. I haven’t blogged about anything financial or economic because it depresses the living fuck out of me (plus typing fucks my back). I have kept up with the situation, and, as a part of that, I’ve read RP’s blog. It’s good. I think RP is a credit to the BBC.  As for Robert Peston having a political bias – bollocks – he’s pissed people off of all stripes, which is an indicator of how good he is.

There are a lot of people who are sane enough to type their mad ideas (how would I know if I was one of them?), and it appears they’re attracted to Robert Peston’s blog like nutters to church. If you’ve got a few minutes you must have a chuckle at the comments on this post. Some of them go from fat-cats to socialist apocalypse faster than Hackney carriage drivers.

* I think there’s a 50/50 chance this will turn into an aggregate cluster fuck rather than a mere cluster fuck. Oh yeah – and nobody has mentioned the affect St Barack’s election in the US has had on British government tax policy, and/or speculated about what that indicates with upcoming US fiscal policy. I suspect the broad direction of fiscal policy was informally discussed well in advance at a well publicised visit to the UK. Lol.

S.H.H on iPlayer.  Woo-hoo.

A quote:

Thirdly, and this is where things get spicy, Korea is an interesting case in terms of how content is released and distributed. Traditional channels, like TV and cinema, are very important here but there is a faster turnaround where that content gets distributed onto other formats like DVD, VOD and now mobile. Whereas Hollywood and western content companies tend to release content serially into these other product lines, in South Korea, content releases are almost parallel.

Essentially they are still staggered but within much shorter timeframes. So whereas in the UK, you might postpone a cinema visit in favour of typically waiting 3-6 months for the DVD release and a year for VOD/cable release, in South Korea audiences are able to expect it much sooner than that.

These factors allowed DirectMedia to capitalise on a hugely under estimated source of revenue; simultaneous and prior releases of derivative content. By working directly with the content rights owners, their distribution power initiated their transition into producing both online and offline derivative content offerings.

JC Allen on mobile content distribution.    The above is the future.   To a certain extent it’s already happening with stuff for television simultaneously released  on iPlayer and 4OD (or Hulu and South Park Studios etc. in the US), and certainly in the case of some videogames.  (like the grossly overrated Spore’s derivative mobile/iPhone games)  But not as much with big Hollywood releases.

I wasn’t going to comment on the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross/Andrew Sachs thing, lest I add to press sentiment that ‘prank call’ story is newsworthy.  But I’m going to comment.  The whole thing is ridiculous, and has brought all kinds of unpleasant people out of the woodwork.  Essentially it is a fuss about someone making a joke about fucking someone, you know – that thing lots of adults do for fun  –  but has played out as if Jonathan Ross has somehow tarred Manuel’s adult granddaughter by outing the fact that Russell Brand shagged her at one of his hot tub parties. As if sex is somehow dirty and a taboo.  The headline should be “Man shags woman, tells grumpy elderly relative, incensed newspaper readers foam at the mouth”

Listen for yourself on YouTube here.  Be sure to check out all of the comments from the new puritans, rabid anti BBC-types, armchair moralists, old people of questionable intelligence, and general fuckwits.

I heard the radio show a couple of weeks ago, the morning after it aired. It was mildly amusing.  When Jonathan Ross shouted out “he fwucked your gwanddaughter” I thought – “So?  Who gives a shit – big deal”.  It wasn’t the funniest Russell Brand show.  It wasn’t particularly notable. The show is much funnier when Russell Brand has a foil such as Matt Morgan (or Simon Amstell).  It was broadcast at night, after 9pm.  The telephone call was arranged in advance, Manuel didn’t pick up the phone.  The programme apologised a few days later.

Thing is – it’s funny now.  It wasn’t that funny to begin with but the shitstorm of indignation from the illiterate opinionated twats of Great Britain has made it lolworthy.  It’s been getting funnier by the morally outraged minute.

All of those people that are morally outraged have been trolled hard, and can go fuck themselves.  If that’s the type of people Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross have offended – good.

I’d pay double the license fee if they could annoy idiot newspaper readers twice a month.

Well done BBC – but it’s stupid to suspend people for pissing off an elderly guest of the show.

People really want a right not to be offended but don’t realise the consequences. They’re too stupid.

I love political drama in the UK press because things play out like a soap opera or third-rate thriller. Commentated by people of questionable rationality. Unlike me. If I were in charge of a BBC television channel I would commission a show in which political correspondents commentate on apes. Like A Life of Grime but with apes and Nick Robinson as John Peel. “Hey, if the good ship ape-house were the titanic, and this was a bad metaphor – Julius, alpha chimp, of the political jungle – his body language is telling – he wants to urinate, or stimulate an erection, AND (inhales), the ramifications for the king are spectacular. Look out for ice-bergs! Over to you Sophie”

All apes ever get credit for is fiddling with themselves, lobbing shit at people, picking fleas off each other, and hanging around. I think that is very unfair and my idea for a television programme would solve the issue.

There’s a sketch from the Fast Show that comprises of Chris Jackson, the crafty cockney, trying to convince naïve people that he’s a thief. But often they don’t believe him because he’s a cheeky, amiable, chap. At a stretch you could pull a metaphor out of your arse with Chris Jackson as certain parts of the financial world and the naïve people as regulators. Here’s an example sketch where he is believed, but told “you can’t do this”.

Robert Peston’s Super Rich: The Greed Game is a much better exploration of the recent turmoil in the financial sector. If you’re in the UK it’s on BBC iPlayer – watch it here. If you’re not in the UK – watch it here.  The Damien Hirst reference in the title is a reference to Robert Peston’s Damien Hirst reference.  Essential viewing.

I’d really like to be able to hate this for being reliant on catchphrases,  a kind of modern-day CU Jimmy/Russ Abbot nightmare (which also attracted millions of viewers), but I can’t because it’s funny.  Here’s a clip of Phyliss and Mr Doggy from Little Britain USA.  Soon to be on US television.  David Walliams is an excellent actor.

The banks that are going to be bailed out by the US taxpayer are going to profit, possibly substantially, from the big bail-out.  Not US taxpayers.  They get all of the risk though.  Specifically from the ludicrously nebulous ‘reverse auction’ that talks in terms of ‘hold to maturity prices’.  This is simultaneously unbelievably funny and scary all at the same time.  I had a chance to watch most of the US senate hearing today and as far as I can tell it’s more of the same thinking that got us all in this mess in the first place. From and by the same people that got us in this mess.

No doubt people will swallow this shit and the ‘hold to maturity prices’ issue will not be addressed by any of the presidential candidates.  Stunningly. mindblowingly, unbelievable.

Robert Peston’s take.

Edit @ 2:32

The more I think about it this may actually be a good plan, with the proviso that the estimated matured prices are a fair representation.  E.g. the prices are what you’d expect for matured dodgy debt and not what you’d expect from vanilla debt.  That could end up costing less than the alternatives.  It was a shame it was so vague.

I for one hope that whatever happens it happens quickly and puts some kind of end to the present turmoil.

This makes me angry.   The BBC has some really good people, including Robert Peston, so when they talk complete bollocks re: oil prices they’ve got no excuse. Here’s what the BBC has to say about today’s spike in oil prices (believe it or not the biggest spike took place in the space of five minutes!) Keep in mind all commodities are up, not just oil:

Record one-day jump in oil price

The price of oil has jumped by more than $16 to $120.92 a barrel, the biggest one-day gain on record.

The increase in the price of US light, sweet crude was driven by concerns about supply.

Production in the Gulf of Mexico is still affected by Hurricane Ike and Saudi Arabia is cutting production.

Oil traders also believe that the US government’s bank bail-out plan will help the economy and therefore demand for oil.

Last week oil traded as low as $91 a barrel. It had fallen from its peak of $147 a barrel that it reached in July.

The volatility in the price has been exacerbated by the fact that the contract for the supply of oil in October expires on Monday.

From here (I’ve cut and pasted for the purposes of discussion and that the BBC has a tendency to edit articles days later).  In my opinion what they have written is unmitigated bullshit.

Here’s what Bloomberg had to say (I’ve cut and pasted for the purposes of discussion and commentary):

Oil Posts Biggest Gain as Traders Caught in End-Month Squeeze

By Mark Shenk

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil climbed more than $25 a barrel, the biggest gain ever, as traders scrambled to unwind positions on the October contract’s last day of trading. The more-active November contract rose $6.62.

“This looks like a squeeze play,” said Phil Flynn, senior trader at Alaron Trading Corp. in Chicago. “All of the contracts are up, but nothing like October. This is the last day of trading and someone is scrambling to guarantee supply.”

Crude oil for October delivery rose $16.37, or 17 percent, to settle at $120.92 a barrel at 2:46 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was the highest settlement price since Aug. 21. Futures for November delivery rose 6.4 percent to settle at $109.37 a barrel.

Prices climbed today as traders who sold the October contract last week, when oil dipped close to $90, had to buy the futures back. In a squeeze a trader has gone short by selling contracts hoping the price will decline. In the last days before the contract expires the trader must buy back the same number of futures or be forced to deliver the underlying oil.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that’s the indication of a huge squeeze,” said Craig Pirrong, director of energy markets for the University of Houston’s Global Energy Management Institute. “It’s just stunning this could happen” given the recent scrutiny in Congress and among U.S. regulators concerning the crude oil markets, he said.

`Yawning Gap’

“It’s a very small pool playing in this market right now, and that’s why you’re seeing those massive differentials” between the October and November contracts, said David Kirsch, an energy markets analyst at PFC Energy in Washington. “Somebody did place a wrong bet and is trying to cover that position.”

“The overarching factor is that the October futures contract expires today,” said Ryan Oatman, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in Houston. “This is a classic short squeeze. What lead up to it was a strong euro, up on concerns U.S. government actions will ultimately result in a greater budget deficit, higher inflation and a weaker dollar.”

Investors looking to hedge against the dollar’s decline earlier this year have helped lead oil, gold, corn and gasoline to records. Oil rose as high as $130 a barrel, up from $104.55 on Sept. 19, as the dollar dropped on concern that a U.S. proposal to buy $700 billion of troubled assets from financial firms will deepen the budget deficit.

The dollar declined 2.4 percent to $1.4817 per euro, from $1.4466 on Sept. 19. It touched $1.4818, the weakest level since Aug. 22.

Hard Assets

“Gold, silver, oil, copper, just about any hard asset, is looking good at this point,” said Michael Fitzpatrick, vice president for energy risk management at MF Global Ltd. in New York. “With the dollar down and stocks getting hit, commodities look like a safe play.”

Oil has risen 33 percent since Sept. 16 as lawmakers pledged fast consideration of the Treasury’s plan to buy devalued mortgage-related securities.

“There’s a flight to quality and the energy markets are benefiting,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts. “The dollar is down again and investors are fleeing to commodities. We are back to the cycle that pushed prices to records earlier this year.”

Hedge-fund managers and other large speculators increased their net-long position in New York crude-oil futures in the week ended Sept. 16, according to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data.

Speculative long positions, or bets prices will rise, outnumbered short positions by 19,379 contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Washington-based commission said in its Commitments of Traders report.

Gasoline

Gasoline for October delivery increased 10.41 cents, or 4 percent, to settle at $2.7038 a gallon in New York. Heating oil rose 14.52 cents, or 5 percent, to settle at $3.043, the biggest single-session gain since June 6.

Regular gasoline, averaged nationwide, declined 1.8 cents to $3.739 a gallon, AAA, the nation’s largest motorist organization, said today on its Web site. Pump prices reached a record $4.114 a gallon on July 17.

Crude oil prices are “too high” because the global economic slowdown may spread and cut consumption, the International Energy Agency’s deputy executive director said.

“The economic slowdown in the U.S., Europe hasn’t gotten into China, India much, but at some point you have to presume it will,” William Ramsay said in an interview in Bangkok today.

The Paris-based IEA, which advises 27 developed nations on energy policy, was set up in 1974 in response to the Arab oil embargo.

Brent crude oil for November settlement rose $6.43, or 6.5 percent, to settle at $106.04 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures Europe exchange.

From here.

Who do you think gives a better idea of what happened today?  The BBC or Bloomberg?

Masterchef: The Professionals is brilliant.  I’m no foodie – but I do like good food, and appreciate good restaurants (in the sense that I don’t give a shit about the associated pomp – rather the food).  And Masterchef: The Professionals is all about the food.  Unlike many television shows all of the contestants are already reasonable chefs, and many of the contestants are not just competent; they border on brilliance.  If the up and coming chefs on the show are representative of David Cameron’s Broken Britain, it’s another reason he should go inflate himself with a bicycle pump every time he utters the platitude.   Many of the featured chefs are the future of the UK restaurant scene.

It’s the best food show on television at the moment.  Bar none.  It’s better than Top Chef.  There is zero excessive drama worked in by producers. So well done BBC.  Michel Roux Jnr is a bit scary though.  He reminds me of my old French teacher, who was ex-military, and had a stare that was odd.  But Michel Roux Jnr, and Gregg Wallace, are very good presenters for the show.  Because they know their onions (it’s a good one to note that BBC – front shows with people who know, in-depth, about the subject they’re presenting – seems obvious that one).  They’re also personable.

Great stuff – it’s on iPlayer, but if you can’t get iPlayer where you are you have my permission (as a license fee payer) to pirate it for the benefit of mankind.  It’s a shame it’s on 18:30 on BBC 2 because many people aren’t home to watch it on their actual telly-boxes.  Thanks to iPlayer that’s less of a problem than it was, but I think placing Masterchef: The Professionals in that slot is as bigger crime as the slot the first series of The Mighty Boosh had.

Ghosts, the paranormal, and the associated arse frippery (psychics), are bollocks.   But there’s quite a few shows on television about it.  Taking a hard nosed, cynical, amoral position, for the purposes of this, it makes financial sense to make television programmes trading on people who like that sort of thing.  Because there’s a demand for it.

Thing is, I (kind-of) like the shows, because it’s people walking around dark places, and walking around dark places is scary.  Once I got lost in a forest, at night, while a bit drunk, and got into a panic.  It’s not that I believe in ghosts; it’s just that something primal kicks-in when you’re in the dark, alone, in the middle of nowhere.  After a bit I thought, to the best of my recollection, “fuck-it”, and fell asleep by a tree.  Luckily it was summer, luckily it wasn’t raining, and I wasn’t paralytic. So no hypothermia, exposure, or choking on my own vomit.  I got woken up by a fat dog-walker (golden retriever) at about 05:30, aching to the point that it hurt to walk, and with a mammoth hang-over. Seriously stupid.

Watching programmes like Most Haunted Live can send a little bit of a chill down your spine, if you’re in a exhausted, stupefied, frame of mind (not shouting things like “you feel cold because you’re panicking you fuckwit” at the screen). They can induce a pleasant form of mild hysteria.  I like that.  But – they don’t do it as well as the BBC’s prescient, and fictional, Ghostwatch.  Ghostwatch was Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters before they existed.  Without the grating dramatic sound effects of modern ‘reality’ paranormal shows.  Can’t recommend Ghostwatch enough.  It’s a little dated but it’s still very clever indeed (the style of the programme was identical to BBC live shows in the early 1990s, and featured real BBC presenters, presenting).

You can watch Ghostwatch here.

Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters and the spin-offs are kind of horror/drama lite – the very mildest of  shocks and drama.

Such shows have become like certification bodies for (supposedly) haunted places; imagine the visitor boost for any locations that have been featured on a show.  I think it is human nature that people, some say sensible people, will cheat, mess with the television people that make the shows, because having them say “this place is definitely haunted” is an incentive in itself.   It wouldn’t be difficult to do, if you spend more than a second thinking about it.

But back to Ghostwatch…

What I like best about Ghostwatch (the fictional and better than the ‘real’ shows drama) was that it fucked with the viewer.  Split second flashes of apparitions reflected on patio doors, 50/50 evidence, etc. – great stuff.  If there was a fictional modern Ghostwatch-alike, that kept to the spirit (ha-ha) of playing with the viewer, and the attention to detail (OK – the girls’ accents were a bit wonky, but the locations/costume/equipment used/carpets even were spot-on), it could be quite good.  Ghostwatch, until the last bit, was indistinguishable from real BBC live shows it dramatised.   Decent drama that provides a similar ’spooky’ fix could, in the absence of viewers getting a fucking clue-stick and shunning the paranormal, drain viewers from programmes like Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters.

Notice I didn’t mention Paranormal State.  A man has limits.  If Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters are retarded – Paranormal State is down with potatoes.

Please watch this video.

Having watched it you’ll probably agree that Matthias Rath dropping a case against the Guardian and Ben Goldace is a good thing indeed.  Ben Goldacre attacked with the troll stick of truth and won. Read about it in today’s Guardian, Ben’s Bad Science blog, and other blogs that are covering it.  It’s worth covering.

Picture borrowed from here.  Transport history is underrated.

And well done Guardian for sticking up for your writers in-between fellating the Labour Party and (on the plus side) pissing off the Tories.

Beavis and Butthead get political.

Promise rings are worn as a symbol of commitment to remain chaste until marriage. A pop band wearing them, and therefore promoting them, is no different from a comedian using them as material. Why? Because in both cases they’re examples of people expressing an opinion about sex. My opinion about promise rings is that they’re often worn and promoted by people who disprove of people who do not live as Christians. Given a chance some would enforce their brand of Christianity on others. Preventing teaching of things like evolution, acting against gay rights, and and anything that contradicts scripture. I am not against people making a choice to live as Christians and follow scripture but I’m against anyone dictating what other people can and can’t say. The unfortunate political baggage that comes with promise rings has made such things hot-button topics of the so-called “culture wars”. The culture wars have caused much self-censorship in the US media.

At the 2008 MTV VMAs Russell Brand mocked the Jonas Brothers, and their vow of chastity. In free societies people can choose to wear promise rings, but in a free society people should be able to mock public figures that wear them, in the same way that Jordin Sparks what free to make the telling comment that “It’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody, guy or girl, wants to be a slut.”

Similarly Russell Brand’s political comments were hot-button topics of the culture wars. I think they were funny. Using the word retarded is quite different than making fun of people who are disabled. It walks a fine line because all kinds of words with cultural baggage could be justified along similar lines. Intention is not an excuse in itself. So I’ll elaborate a bit because I think it’s an issue of specificity, context, and current usage. Retardation is one of those horrible medical terms of old that was applied to a whole host of things that would be given clear diagnosis today. It’s not a specific medical condition. The context of joke was about world leaders and potential world leaders – aimed at people in a position of power. The current usage of retarded is not primarily used as a phrase to mock disabled people. That’s a good test of politically incorrect phrases: What’s the specificity? What’s the context? What’s the current usage?

What I find particularly funny is that Russell Brand was trolling – pure and simple. The act ticked every box of the so-called culture wars. People are discussing it days later, the ratings were up in key demographics, all the parties involved get more attention (Jordin Sparks’ media profile has increased significantly, the Jonas Brothers got some headlines, so did Russell Brand), and this is the power of trolling. It’s a demonstration that the self-censorship in the US media of the last 7 years may not sell as well, or give as bigger buzz, as having diverse opinions represented in popular media outlets.  In publicity alone the MTV VMAs 2008 are a win.

The up-in-arms comments against Russell Brand on Internet forums have been retarded: So why pander to these people?  They want to tell you what to do – including what you can and can’t say.

On a lesser note some Twilight fans are completely mental.

Here.

Sagan cited Dumb and Dumber as an example of dumbing down, Richard Dawkins is grating*, albeit unwittingly, and many books criticising pseudo-science are risible in their preaching to the choir smugness. Ben Goldacre is funny, can write for laymen without treating us like morons, and is a serious fuck-off academic ninja**. Buy Ben Goldacre’s book on Amazon here, you’ll enjoy the book.

* Although I agree up to a point.
** Or, also accurately, a junior doctor in London, and a shameless geek.

Photo of Ben nicked to make this post look bigger.  He looks like he’s sheepishly owning up to stealing his own book.

If you catch me, in some green and pleasant carbuncle, beating my arms against the earth, face down, febrile, crying “It’s retarded!  For fuck’s sake! Why does it work?  IT MAKES NO SENSE”, you’ll know I’ve been watching too much of the news.  Today’s examples come from John McCain and Barack Obama’s political campaigns.  I have nothing against either of them – it’s the campaigns, I find it extremely dull, and depressing.  Moreover the fact that things like showing your kids waiving at a video screen that has no eyes to see, and public tough talk on foreign policy, can, in themselves, affect public sentiment towards you. It makes baby Jesus weep.  In my head at least.  I’m not suggesting it’s ubiquitous.

It’s like PR: Say, for instance, a star wants to seem more family friendly – it’s arranged so that they’re photographed on a family day out, or eating an ice cream in the park (where have you heard the ice-cream line before?), and, it’s not that it’s fake; it could reflect reality, but that the pictures are just snippets, tiny parts of a picture that you won’t see the whole of.  Because, by necessity, we can’t all know each other. The specific problem is the degree to which people base their judgements on such superficial illustrations of complicated things. The news media shares blame for reporting things in such uncritical terms; by and large, unless the correspondents are total fuckwits, they know it’s a game.  They’re playing it too.  They know how complicated the world is really.

Based on how PR – through ice cream in the park, tough talk, waving at electronics, etc. – affects public image, the public must lap it up.

Are we really that retarded?  Isn’t it all a bit exploitable?  What would happen if people told the truth?  (It’s usually far more complicated than you think, you fucking dolts).  They’d fail.  Hard.  Yeah, I’m that fucking cynical.

And the worst thing?  You’d think celebrity news is inherently more dishonest than coverage of really important things, like the next leader of the free world, but it isn’t.  Celebrity news has evolved to the point where the viewer/consumer is in on the game too, rather than excluded.  Take Perez Hilton or TMZ or MrPaparazzi – they’re honest about PR.   Pictures of Gordon Brown eating an ice cream in the park?   Perez Hilton would draw cocks on the pictures in MS Paint.  The rest of the media would report them unedited.

The Dentist Song from Little Shop of Horrors.

Watch for yourself here.

You know that when a television programme contains Britain in the title it’s attempting to cash-in on a collective sense of identity.  In most cases it’s a bit lazy.  In the case of Britain’s Really Disgusting Foods its symptomatic of the laziness, vacuity, and attempt to cash in on essentialist presumptions about food.   If I were to go down the essentialist route also I could sum-up the show up in a single sentence: The programme has cherry-picked the cheapest foods available to caterers in order to create a straw-man argument, cherry picked experts with vested interests against things like mechanically recovered meat, and created a cloud of brainless confusion aimed at a teenage audience on BBC 3.

The presenter, who’s mildly funny, like dandruff, starts the programmes by saying “I reckon there’s certain things that need answering once and for all, so I’ve composed an email to the meat hygiene service looking for some answers”.  He asks them if ears, eyes, eyelids, noses, brains, lips, nipples, bumholes (rather than anus – the programme is aimed at the youth, man, and they all say bumhole), tail,  testicles, penis, bones, and ballbag, are allowed in sausages.  Testicles appear twice.  Presumably for comedic purposes.  Ha ha.  Twenty minutes later we find out that none of those things are allowed in sausages.  There is, however, a loop hole that means that if you don’t call your meat products sausages they’re allowed 5% meat.  Which I’ll return to.

The programme goes on to discuss the cheapest chicken breasts available to caterers.  Which, surprisingly, or not, as the case may be, are injected with water, salt, and stabilisers.  Partly because they’re frozen.  According to the programme this is disgusting.  A great opportunity to inform the audience is missed  at every opportunity.  Salt, and the associated problems of over consumption are well known, but the chief point the programme makes about the chicken breasts is that they’re disgusting.   Without any qualification of the health ramifications of added salt – or that if consumed sensibly there’s really no problem.  But according to the programme they are disgusting simply because they’ve undergone processing.  Animal welfare can go fuck itself.  It’s not touched upon at all.

Then, at a food trade fair, to demonstrate how disgusting the cheapest, nastiest, cherry-picked faux-sausages are, they give a demonstration of how to make the cheapest, nastiest, faux-sausages. Raising the spectre of mechanically recovered meat.  In order to do this they get Richard Guy – the Real Meat Company founder, who has no conflict of interest at all, an entirely neutral contributor (like fuck)  to give a demonstration of mechanically recovered meat.  Holding up a chicken carcass that had the breast, leg, and other good bits of meat, removed.  Which is exactly what I use to make an excellent chicken soup, using the leftovers from a Sunday roast. He then goes on to explain how the meat – the straggly bits sinew etc. -  is removed in a factory to produce a paste.  They mention the use of ingredients like sodium metabisulfite, and they state, unequivocally, that it “isn’t there to make you live longer, be happier or anything else, it’s there to make a heap of disgusting meat stick together”.

Sodium metabisulfite is familiar to all home brewers.  It is used to sterilise equipment.  It is also a preservative.  It has been used to a very long time, and it has zero side-effects.  You piss it out.  It has absolutely nothing to do with sticking meat together.  It extends the shelf-life of products, and helps prevent food poisoning.  BBC 3 viewers should take what BBC 3 tells them with a pinch of salt.

Shortly after the that programme cuts to a chalk board with “The search for the Worlds Worst Sausage”  the apostrophe is missing from World presumably on purpose, for comedic purposes.  The problem with the board is that technically it’s false advertising.  The cheapest, nastiest, faux sausages they are making are not legally allowed to be called sausages.  No mention is made of the fat-content or salt content.  The two chief problems with the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  It’s referenced – they mention that fat goes in. But not how much or how much salt goes in.

The programme then consults a nutritionist, who tells us, with minimal elaboration, what we already know about the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  Nutritionally they’re not very good. Surprise surprise.

They later mention hydrogenated fats.  Hydrogenated fats are bad.  They state that hydrogenated fat “Increases risk of coronary heart disease/contains no nutritional value”.  They do increase the risk of coronary heart disease.  Similar to butter or other natural products that contain saturated fats.  However – they’re wrong about hydrogenated fats containing no nutritional value.  It’s the trans-fats which are a by-product of hydrogenated fats that have no nutritional value.  No mention is made of the problems with saturated fats.  Presumably because telling people their expensive supermarket best sausages can also be bad for their health doesn’t fit their straw-man argument.

They pick on the use of waxy starch in apple pie filling.   Which is no different from using cornflour to thicken things.  But that wouldn’t support the argument.

The programme’s attitude towards E-Numbers is similarly stupid.  At one point the host compares E-Numbers to excrement.  They mention that an E-Number colouring is derived from coal tar.  Like paracetamol used to be, and a whole host of other things utilising organic chemistry.  The idea that anything good can be derived from coal tar is ignored.  To support the argument that the E-number colouring in question is bad they mention that it’s banned in two countries.  I don’t know how many countries it is not banned in, but that doesn’t support the argument, so it’s omitted.

They talk about how marketing people give a false impression of food.  The next time I get a shag out of wearing Lynx deodorant I’ll celebrate by eating a trans-fat laden cake in a park where it’s always sunny and there’s no dog shit.  Marketing gives a misleading idea of what product is/does.  Well I never.  If the argument about misleading advertising were backed up by a coherent argument about unhealthy or disgusting food the programme may have had a point.  Instead it’s an opinion piece of the worst kind.

BBC 3 and Britain’s Most Disgusting Foods are shit.  It’s a broadly misleading programme, aimed at teenagers, that adds nothing to the argument about healthy food, and potentially increases the ignorance of its viewers.  The programme contains nothing about how much salt, saturated fat, and sugar it is healthy to consume.

Channel 4 News’ Alex Thompson asking if the International Olympic Committee is embarrassed about being duped on the right to free protest during the Beijing Olympics.  Watch here.  Given the general credulity of the press it’s a nice reminder that some of them are capable of trolling.

On the basis of Dancefloor Chart I sought out his gigs.  By then the rave scene was a bit crap, and boring.  Russell Brand’s show (with, it must be said,  the essential addition of Matt Morgan) was worth watching.  Not for the music, but because it’s funny.  Watch:

Dancefloor Chart.

I can’t work out whether the guy is rushing or having a panic attack at 1m20s.  It’s funny either way. Stimulants. Lol.

Television.  Light entertainment.  Cooking.  One of the things I hate about celebrity chefs is that  for the purposes of entertainment they intervene in lives, and make recommendations about diets.    I’ll refer to such programmes as “intervention television”.  Of course, intervention television exists in many forms, notable examples are “I’m a cretin that subsists on chips – help me BBC 3”, “Fuck-a-doodle-do  I’m fat – come gawk at me like I’m a freak” on Channel 4, and “poor kids shouted at by 1950s pedo teachers” on Channel 5.  I’ll stick to food though, because celebrity chefs deliver petitions to Number 10 Downing Street, and, furthermore, they think they’re the shit (they are in a sense).

An episode of the F-Word particularly annoyed me.  Gordon Ramsay, in full on intervention mode, met some 20-something NORPs that live on takeaway curry, one of whom wants to run a marathon.  Gordon, in his infinite wisdom, recommended a curry recipe; the logic being that someone that lives on curry would want to cook it for themselves.  My problem is that if people can’t do basic food right, there’s fuck all point in teaching them things like making a curry.  As soon as the celebrity chef has gone the rice will be overcooked, the food will be under-seasoned, and worse the fuckers will force their new found gastronomic confidence on guests.

Often people who, basically, can’t cook, buy the latest Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay cookbook.  It’s not that the recipes are bad, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay are better chefs than the majority of people, it’s just that the pretentious fuckers buying their books often can’t cook a decent soup, let alone many of the recipes.  That’s why I think Marco Pierre White, and Delia Smith *, aside from being mental as rabid badgers, in their own way, are doing better things for British food than walking cocks like Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay. They are teaching delicious basics.  That’s what many people in the UK need.  Not over-complication and pretentious fuckwittery.  For example – basic soup.

Anyone can cook a decent, ubergruppenhealthy **, soup.  All of what follows is approximate, and flexible:

The core of the recipe: One sliced medium onion, two peeled chopped carrots (or more if you like carrots), a bay leaf,  a few handfuls of of chopped potatoes, a couple of sticks of chopped celery, a peeled whole clove of garlic (more if you want), and some skinned chicken.  Put it all in a big saucepan cover with water  (plus a couple of stock cubes – although some are cuboids strictly speaking) or stock, put in some dried black peppercorns to taste (five or six is fine).  Optional herbs include thyme,  parsley,  tarragon (be careful – it’s a dominating herb –  a small pinch at most) etc.  That’s a basic soup.  Optional other stuff includes chopped ham, mushrooms, cabbage, leftover vegetables, a small handful of pearl barley, a handful of rice,  – nettles even, swedes, turnips, celeriac etc. etc.  It’s simple.

Cover. Bring to the boil simmer for an hour or more, taste, season, remove any bones, skim any excess fat, and voilà – acceptable, very healthy, soup.  A cheap pack of 12 chicken thighs will be enough for about 8 people with large soup portions – more people can be served if there’s some bread.  Alternatively a left-over roast chicken carcass is just fine also but it will need to be simmered longer.  A kid with minimal supervision and a blunt butter knife can make soup.  You can experiment, and find the perfect combinations/ratios for you.  Don’t get me started about dumplings and suet dumplings. A well trained dog could probably make them.  Bit of white pepper in the dumplings – lovely.

Total cost less than £8 – the main cost is the meat.  Dried herbs are fine. If it’s left overs the total cost is less than £5.  Hate chicken?  Use cheap cuts of lamb (cheap is betters suited to simmering) or rabbit (drop the tarragon in both cases IMHO), simmer until the meat is tender, and flavours defuse.

Celebrity chefs are teaching people stuff they aren’t equipped to do well.  MPW and DS excluded. I’d rather have a decent soup or other healthy basic recipe than some faddish nightmare cooked badly from a recipe book.  Serious.   Marco Pierre White is right.

* Years ago, at some ill-defind point in the past, I watched Delia Smith in an altered state of mind, and it took me weeks to get over it. In fact just thinking about it makes a little nervous.
** Which is, after all, what Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay has in mind for us.  For us all to be ubergruppenhealthy.

Watch: Johnny Vegas interviewing Stuart Lee about Russell Brand.

At first I thought Stuart Lee came across as a bit of a twat.  But the more I think about it, anyone that takes something as gospel truth, with anything produced for entertainment purposes, is very credulous.  There can be such a thing as fact based jokes* but it’d be a dull world if it was all fact based.  I think that Stuart Lee, maybe belatedly, ‘fessed-up during a DVD extra,  letting an audience**  know that comedy isn’t about facts, makes the whole thing OK.  Johnny Vegas looks genuinely aggrieved at misquoting.  Johnny Vegas sold his wedding photos to Viz for £1.

* First heard the phrase spoken by Simon Amstell – a funny clip here.
** Albeit however many watch DVD extras/YouTube.

PS – I’m not sure if the Stuart Lee video is a pisstake.

A 1915 lecture in PDF and other formats.  Woohoo Internet.

When newspapers, and many others, use the phrase scientist or scientists, it is usually to assert that something has some kind of innate authority.  It’s silly.   We are all guilty of turning off our brain sometimes when an expert says something, because they’re an expert; we are conditioned somewhat to listen to experts, because, within the scope of their expertise, they’re probably right.  But it’s not clever to accept anything without examination.  It’s not the fault of experts per-se.  It’s a universally accepted truth that some people are arseholes or a bit bonkers.  Even experts. Most people aren’t.

On to Dr Edgar Mitchell – scientist: I don’t think Edgar Mitchell is an arsehole.  I also think what he has to say is somewhat newsworthy because of who he is.

I don’t think he’s a liar (people who believe stuff aren’t).  I don’t think he’s harmful.  Unlike the overwhelming majority of people he has been to the moon.   In a recent Kerrang Radio interview he unequivocally stated that extraterrestrial life exists.  But, from what I’ve read, unless life is very rare, there is likely to be life on planets capable of supporting it.  I’m not closed minded about it.  Belief in extraterrestrial life is not that controversial, it may turn out to be wrong, and I’d accept that.  I think he’s wrong to be so definite about it.

Unfortunately he then goes on to say that extraterrestrials have visited earth.  I think this is highly unlikely because of the stellar distances involved.  Space is very big.  The nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centuri, is 4.2 light years away; at light speed that’s 4.2 years travel.  39.69 trillion km away.  39,690,000,000,000 km.  Fast-as and faster than light travel are probably impossible.  It’d be great if it were possible, imagine a computer that received messages before it sent them.   Life could be much farther away than 4.2 light years.  There may not be life near Proxima Centuri.  Technologically advanced life may be significantly rarer than life.

For such reasons it is highly unlikely any extraterrestrial would visit earth without spaceships that could travel at speeds that make long distance travel practical well within their life-span.  I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion.

Edgar Mitchell elaborates, according to him, not only have aliens visited earth, but they’ve also been in contact with governments.   If aliens were visiting earth, contacting governments superficially makes sense.  They administer a lot of things, and they’re supposed to be representative.  But I question why any advanced beings would want to get involved.   There are several problems.  Firstly, any exchanges of technology or knowledge would give whichever geographic grouping of primitives a huge advantage over the other primitives.  So it would have to be done selectively or globally.  Even selectively as soon as the others found out there’s potential for trouble.

Secondly, assuming that extraterrestrial visitors have paid attention to the last couple of centuries, in which millions of people have died in various conflicts, I would think the transfer of technology to us as a species could be a bit of a risk.  Unless the aliens retained a bigger stick.  We have not behaved rationally towards each other.

But…

What really annoys me about Edgar Mitchell, and disclosure UFO people in general, is that it rests on foundations that are made of anecdotes.  It’s always something that has been heard ‘in intelligence circles’ or something on the grapevine.  Some expert clique.  If they want to be taken seriously by sane people they need Who, Where, When, and Why  – but they conveniently hide behind the same secrecy they claim to be against.

“Who told you?”

“Can’t say – it’s secret”

Time Gentlemen Please is a sitcom that is coarse, has a laugh track, was broadcast on a satellite channel, and was critically underrated because of snobbishness.  It’s actually very good.   It’s primarily written by Al Murray, and Richard Herring. The cast are good – Phil Daniels stands out, playing the flatulent pervert Terry Brook.   Many Terry Brook lines are cheesy but he says them so grubbily they’re funny (something Richard Herring also does well in other programmes/stand-up).  The programmes recurring characters are all memorable and developed throughout the series, and there’s a lot of back-references.  Watch episode two here.  If Guv’nor were on the Internet he would appear on spEak You’re Branes as a result of comments on BBC Have Your Say.  DVDs are available.

Earlier this week I said something about a row of trees or bushes in dim silhouette. Read it, it’s like, short. About the Northampton Paranormal Group/English Civil War/Battle of Naseby ‘ghost photo’.  Well, the fine journalists of BBC Look East, counted among the finest journalists in the world,  have covered the story for regional news, and you can view where, exactly, the photo was taken.  In turn their report was picked up by the BBC News Online website, who want the clicks:

Watch here.

Trees and bushes in silhouette taken at night with a digital compact camera with a small CCD and low signal to noise ratio (SNR) by default at night.   It’s just as well the BBC employs so much critical thinking, and doesn’t lend credibility to bollocks.   Worst thing is that if the BBC have the story it will soon be picked up internationally.  So look forward to it being the funny story at the end of your favourite news programmes.

The news works like that.

I had a chance to watch the above programme.  I’m going to try to be polite because I suspect Marco Pierre White would not take kindly to being called odd (particularly the kind of odd I mean).  Though I mean it in the Great British Eccentric sense.  Not necessarily liver and fava beans.  It’s a wonderful programme and Marco Pierre White is great in it. Wonderful cooking. So I’ll point to Tony Naylor’s review, here, because I think it hits the nail on the head, and does it without calling MPW mental.

Plus I think the comments some of the comments on Tony Naylor’s piece are a national treasure.

Someone has gone to the trouble of uploading episodes of “Man About The House” (a nightmare 1970s sitcom that makes Two Pints look like a logical progression) to the tubes but nobody has uploaded any episodes of “Rising Damp”. It’s criminal.

Trailer Park Boys is very clever sitcom for the following reasons:

• Character development:  It is impossible to get a grip on a Trailer Park Boys character through any one episode.  The characters and their lives are complex.   Ricky, for instance, becomes explicable throughout the series/seasons by exploring his relationship with his father,  which in turn explains his attitudes towards his family.
• Dialogue:  Trailer Park Boys has the cleverest dialogue of any current sitcom.  Each character has their own unique grammar and real thought has gone into everything from their malapropisms to their reserve.
• Acting: Jim Lahey is the best sitcom comedy drunk.  He is a believable drunk. The acting skills of all involved are good, but particularly Robb Wells and John Dunsworth.  They’re as good as the majority of celebrated character actors.
• Plot arc:  Each series has a underlying plot arc beautifully intertwined with each episode.   Each series is like a great album, where each song works well alone, but in sequence makes a thing of beauty.
• Attention to detail:  The set design and costume design is awesome. There is as much background detail as real life.
• Direction:  I suspect a polarising filter, but may be wrong, and it’s such a minor niggle (on a technical point about glare reduction causing increased colour saturation) that I’m a bit of a twat to mention it.  The direction is brilliant.  It’s a faux reality television format, but at no point interferes with the plot or distracts the viewer.

Watch this.  Pay attention to each character’s grammar, background detail, and references to the series plot arc. It’s one of my favourite episodes, called “The Delusions of Officer Jim Lahey”, but bear in mind that one episode of Trailer Park Boys will make less sense in isolation, because of the richness of the plot and characters.    So, if you want some quality entertainment, buy the DVDs, or borrow it on the Internet.  At first glance it looks like a collection of stereotypes, thus proving first glances are bullshit.

Porridge is another great sitcom.  There was a spin-off: “Going Home” (watch here). Going Straight is not as good as the main series, but Ronnie Barker’s elite acting skills elevate it from the mundane.

When this was shown in the UK originally the BBC put it on really late at night.  Another top ten sitcom.  This episode is a chunk of George Costanza gold.  Alternative medicine can be cheaper than evidence based medicine.  But at what cost?

Another in the pantheon of sitcom genius.  Watch episode one here.

Remember kids – buy the DVDs of stuff you watch online.  If you like what you see. The quality is better, a proportion of the price goes to the people involved, and there’s extras.

Remember  media companies – freebies can sell DVDs – look at it a bit like handing out first hits of crack.  Make DVDs worth buying by providing decent, rather than half-arsed, extras.

I’m trying to think of a classic sitcom that doesn’t have a least one character “like someone we (collectively) know”.  Someone we say things like “I know someone who is just like …” about.  Of course, it’s an illusion, because real life people don’t have attributes that are recognised in an audience to the extent of a good sitcom character.  Good sitcom writers create funny, multifaceted stereotypes from stereotypes that already exist. Compound stereotypes.  Aggregates. Multifaceted because the interpretation of a characters will vary between viewers, and the quality of the writing.

I should think any new sitcom character that is recognised as “someone who is just like …”  by a broad audience, is half-way to becoming the next Alan Partridge or George Costanza or Hyacinth Bucket.  That half-way mark is probably very difficult to transcend because character recognition is nothing without good writing, acting, and directing.

A couple of years ago I had a chat with someone about Hollywood.  Specifically the way it works financially.  Money is tangible.  From what I heard, creatively speaking, it sounds like a nightmare.  Because first week takings for a film are everything.   The money that goes into promoting a film is spectacular.  Let alone the cost of filming it and talent.  Star power is a huge deal.  A star can turn a mediocre (but not awful) film into something that is profitable.  So the onus on big Hollywood film studios is to be risk averse.  Apparently they are more risk averse than ever.

Careers are on a knife-edge with every film.

I reckon it’s possible that Hollywood will permanently split. Into riskier low budget studios (many as subsidiaries of larger studios), and big budget studios that produce genre films with everyman/everywoman lead characters, played by big name stars, and directed by good (but mostly not brilliant) directors.  A high risk margin/low risk margin dichotomy.  I think it’s already happened a bit. The big studios will still produce films that are Oscar winning brilliance, but mostly they won’t, because taking the chance is too risky. The future is capitalised Hollywood, and it’s cooler uncapitalised younger sibling hollywood. hollywood surfs the net grandad (to paraphrase Richard Herring).

Independent film making will corporatise and be assimilated. Not necessarily a bad thing because it may mean substantially more independent films with significantly better distribution, and competition between smaller studios.   There are a lot of really great independent films no-one gets to see because they’re limited to wanky art-house cinemas, and those of us that walk the line on the internet.  Internet distribution and corporate distribution will positively change that.

See this.  He’s one of the few people writing about a market and considering incentives in their broader context.  Rather than the pathetic form of supply/demand pareidolia and ad-hoc fallacy that defines most mainstream media coverage of oil prices. These guys are OK though.

Remember:  Generally speaking it’s more fucked up than you think.  If ‘fucked up’ is used a profane shorthand for complexity.

I am aching – bad – hence slow blogging/sitcoms.

PS – Journalists:  Why not fly out to the gulf states and see for youself if there’s any problem keeping up with demand by examining shipping in-depth.   You may or may not be surprised.  I don’t know.  It’s not my job. If I were a journalist I probably be a lazy bastard who spent time lunching with people whose companies have huge vested interest in rising commodity prices, staggering out at about 16:30, and bashing out copy before playing online games.  But that’s just me.

I think The Brittas Empire is in the top ten sitcoms of all time.  If that makes me a bad person so be it.   Watch the first episode here (if you watch it full screen the ads are less obvious).  Keep watching; it takes a while to tune into the monster that is Gordon Brittas. Although you’ve probably met at least one.  They hold minor positions of power everywhere.  It’s a semi-plausible conspiracy theory.

And episode two, watch here.

The War Game * and The Day After ** – see also Threads ***.

* The War Game keeps getting removed from Google and YouTube.  Whoever keeps flagging it is a twat.  It’s genius.  Something that is 50+ years old, and already paid for, shouldn’t be removed.  For starters there’s the history of it.  People need to be reminded.

** If you buy the DVD you don’t have to put up with shitty download speeds.

*** I think this is better than The Day After.

A documentary.  Like science fiction, but real.

APOLLO-11 Hasselblad cameras.

With that in mind:  Lunar Conspiracy &tc.  Didn’t people dress funny.  Look forward to nineties themed parties in seven years time.  If not already every Friday night in the provinces.

The Sun is more pro-freedom than The Guardian. It used to be the other way around. No doubt we can look forward to articles by those on the left defending Labour because “they’re to the left of the Conservatives” – but Labour aren’t to the left of the Conservatives – they’re left in the sense of Soviet Authoritarianism. I am on the left – next general election I’m voting lib-dem – but I will never vote Labour again. Arresting teenagers over placards was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I think The Guardian are apologists for the Labour party and their lack of criticism is part of the reason Labour will lose heavily at the next election.

Meta4orce is an animated gem in a sea of celebrity worship aimed at kids (BBC Switch). The script is written by Peter Milligan. Watch it on iPlayer here, if you’re in the UK. More importantly play the game. That’s the clever bit. Otherwise watch the trailer, and find it elsewhere.

There’s plenty on television but nothing that grabs me. Which got me thinking…

What would I like to watch?

Which is a question everybody should ask and write blog posts about. It’s a difficult question because it’s hard to go beyond simple statements like “a good comedy” or “a decent documentary”. Good and decent are not qualities that are universally appreciable – they’re relative to me/you. There’s plenty of things that are good that other people think are shit and vice-versa. So, maybe the question should be revised to:

What would I like to watch that other people would like to watch?

The difference between “What would I like to watch?” and “What would I like to watch that other people would like to watch?” is something that is often overlooked . Homer Simpson was not aware of the distinction between such questions when he designed his car. On the other-hand it’s a bit self important to make presumptions about what other people want to watch – but surely it would be more self-important to say what I’d like to watch without reference to other people? Or is that worse? Why bother to talk about it at all if I’m going to feel bad about it?

There comes a time, in every bloggers life, maybe during a flicker of remorse for wasted minutes bashing at a keyboard, that you start off with something, and talk yourself out of writing about it. Because it’s rubbish. Less lazy, more committed bloggers wouldn’t even bother to post this. What a loss to the world that would be.

TBC

@ the Roxy.  Not surprised Americans dig it based on taking some colonial chums to his act a couple of years ago.

Via his Rock Profile.

WKUK.

Via Google Video.  Tame but interesting interview.

David Davis on Sky News.  I think everyone is seriously underestimating David Davis, and how David Cameron could benefit from this.

This. He wasn’t allowed to make the statement in Parliament. I think it’s a shrewd political move, and a good speech. Viva YouTube.

This.

WKUK.

Watch This from South Park Studios. If it had a dedicated RSS feed it would be better.

For running this on the front page.  I love some of the comments.  They appear to take the attitude that they don’t care what the facts are because they’ve got a theory.  It would be wonderful to be a pitgoat; with an unyielding idea of how things work.  Must be reassuring. See also.

This. 2. 3.

Compare the following programme segments:

Programme 1
Programme 2

Compare and provide commentary.  Your answer should be no longer than 2000 words.

[20] points.

Optional:

[10] points.  Publish the finished answer as a ‘blog’ entry.  The examining board can’t be arsed.

This.

Let’s shoot the shit Internet public. If it’s the case that:

• The behaviour of children is mostly influenced by their upbringing – which, for most people, is provided by their parents.
• Said parents were children in the past.

It seems very strange to call for a return to the past in order to deal with moral panics bad behaviour among young people.  Maybe I’m saying is way out there illogical because you rarely hear it used as a defense against fucked up rose-tinted diversionary over-simplistic actively harmful nostalgia “things were better in the past”.  The good old days.

Cause there is no moral vacuum, people are generally less fucked up than the past (less: racism, wife-beating, children-beating, abject poverty, bad health, ignorance, and a lot of other negative shit, man),  and people that tell you otherwise should be birched.   The future, upcoming recession aside, is bright and I’m pretty optimistic.  Optimistic is not equal to complacent.

Just for the record Brown talks a great deal of bollocks too.

All sensible predictions about the internet are right – but they’re a decade or more out. They’re a decade out because they’re mostly dependent on people using the Internet and capable of using a search engine. There will be (roughly) linear growth per year of school leavers in Western Countries where Internet connections are becoming ubiquitous among the middle classes. It will become a primary source of media, entertainment, and news, for many people. Sites that cater to the youth market will experience the most rapid growth and have the best advertising potential. Second to that will be news followed by everything else. The old media will lose print readers/viewers proportionally. When those less adept at the Internet become a minority there will be as much money in online things like blogs as there is in the traditional media. Because audience numbers of popular sites will justify big money advertising. There will be another dot-com boom when the Internet reaches saturation point among adults – maybe in a decade. Old-media will go the same route as radio did when televisions reached saturation point. Adapt. Popular sites of today may end up as institutional as newspapers if they’re around for the duration of the shift to the tubes.

I have just discovered spEak You’re bRanes, via the Bad Science miniblog, and it’s wonderful. A blog chronicling the BBC News Online Have Your Say section. A must-see bit is The Twat-O-Tron. Just click new for a fairly typical Have Your Say comment. I think it raises the possibility of a Terminator-Skynet like botnet of fascist android sockpuppets. It really wouldn’t require much in the way of AI.

Russia: A Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby was good. Available to watch on the good bit of the BBC’s iPlayer here. If you’re in the UK.

Hopefully there will be a torrent or YouTube upload. The only failing of the documentary was that it packed too much in. That’s a niggle though. It’s a refreshing step-back to BBC documentaries; it’s not dumbed down, the soundtrack and camera-work are restrained, and the subject matter largely speaks for itself. It’s the kind of programme that is rarely made on commercial television channels and does a good job of distinguishing the BBC.

I have just discovered the show and I’d like to watch any previous episodes. However, I can’t because they are only available on iPlayer for a limited time. I can’t see why – other than to protect commercial DVD sales. If potential DVD sales are factored into the cost of producing the programme then it’s debateable, and possibly reasonable. If, on the other-hand, the license fee paid for the programme, time limits are wrong and should be removed.

It has been paid for by the license fee, and, people are already distributing BBC programmes, for free via Bittorrent. They’d do the same with programmes that were released into the wild legally. So costs for online distribution may go down if the BBC dropped the DRM nonsense. People don’t talk about that.

When you’ve been awake for quite some time, and the world is a bit weird, and your eyes are heavy, and you’re falling asleep, then waking, in quick jerks, like an insomniac baby, the last thing you want to do is blog. Sentences get out of hand. So I’m going to dedicate roughly, by which I mean exactly, one paragraph to blog posts I thought about writing but can’t be arsed. Although (in retrospect it’s easy) 2 is a bit more than one paragraph.

1. I’m prejudiced. Generally, when British talent goes to America, and achieves some kind of success, they become boring. But Russell Brand is an exception. Rather than go down the route of “I’m famous now, so I’ll play it safe”, he’s gone down the route of “I’m famous now, so I can say what I want”. In other words, he’s managed to stay funny in the face of success. Listen here. It’s very funny. Rather than ratcheting down he’s ratcheting up.
2. It annoys me when people knock vegetarians. I’m not a vegetarian. But I can understand it. The idea that there isn’t good vegetarian and vegan food is bullshit (for example see here and a lot of the world’s cuisine). I can buy the arguments about the efficiency of producing meat and its impact on the environment. It’s inefficient. But in terms of environmental impact – it’s not a uniquely meat problem, and it applies as much to produce in general. Moral objection to killing animals is reasonable. The health thing is debateable.
   But there are some smug vegetarians. I met one recently.
   They were also very smug about their bicycle. Their poop smells probably smells worse than mine. I expect they get less constipation because of the high fibre associated with a vegetarian diet. I bet they feel smug about that too. So I hope they inexplicably get hemorrhoids. And the road is really bumpy when they’re out cycling.
   If they’re reading this, they probably realise, deep down, that their smuggery last week didn’t impress me.
3. I’ve got fuck-loads of lithium batteries in my bedroom. BP-511(s) (which all weigh around 80 grammes) , EN-EL3e(s) (inexplicably I didn’t weigh these) and some laptop ones (which I did weigh but I am too tired to remember the weight), If, after a day or two awake, you weigh batteries to make sure they weigh the same, you’ve gone wrong.
4. Minicab offices are fucked up. This would not be a paragraph if it wasn’t for this sentence and the next couple, in which I say why. They’re like doctor’s waiting rooms used to dealing with the best and worst of people, and everything in-between, like doctors, but without the medical training, and a propensity to smoke. There was a slot machine.

Interesting interview with Derren Brown.  Part 1 & Part 2.

Sigh.  It’s not the end of the world.

The last episode of Battlestar Galactica  (S4E8) was, to put it bluntly, fucked.  It’s still better than a lot of programmes, and it’s maybe a result of the writers strike, but if the next few episodes are similarly disjointed it’s possible “the cat was dead” will become synonymous with “jumped the shark” (watch the source of the phrase here).  I recorded the dead cat episode on Sky Plus and shall watch it again.  Maybe my opinion of the episode will improve.  But the dead cat sub-plot was, to my mind, unintentionally funny.   If you’re in the US, where episode 8 isn’t out for a little while, sorry for blowing any plot details.  But, it’s such a pointless distraction from the main plot that you’ll lose nothing by me telling you about it.

This. – Etc.

If you’re in the UK you have/had 21 hours left to watch Jon Ronson’s Reverend Death documentary on the Channel 4 website. Click here to watch it. It’s interesting and scary.

I’ve had a chance to watch Jon Ronson’s Reverend Death. Reverend George Exoo is terrifying. He helps people end their life. People who are not terminally ill. He believes they are going to heaven. Even people who have topped themselves (contrary to nearly every religion). I think, regardless of religious belief, the vast majority of people in the world, would agree that he is not an ideal choice to be a a kind of suicide invigilator. The suicidal are not going to get a neutral evaluation of their options or the differences of opinion that are out there.

Many of the suicidal featured in the documentary look as if they could benefit from therapy or help from their local community. They are not terminally ill. No-doubt their pain is real, but unlike the terminally ill, they stand a realistic chance of improvement.

I’ve always found the idea of assisted suicide uncomfortable. I suffer occasionally from very bad bouts of acute back pain, and I know, from personal experience, that pain or preoccupation with pain, severely affects the decision making process. I’ve never felt suicidal, it’s not something I’d do, but I can see how someone who is extremely depressed and in pain could consider it. Then be spurred on by cheerleaders.

The Reverend George Exoos of the world are a separate debate from the terminally ill topping themselves and Ronson was right to document it.

Via Oil and Gas Journal.

Watch this.

Produced by Gregg Mills, of Berkley, – The Bastard of Art and Commerce.

A follow up to this previous post. This BBC News Online story is basically sound and feels like a BBC story should. Well done BBC News Online.

A follow up to this previous post where I called Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall a cock. I’ve changed my mind – he’s not a cock and not all foodies are cunts. He is annoying, but having read a bit of his stuff, he’s basically benign. I read a couple of his books. I’d still wipe my arse with the lifestyle sections of most newspapers. There are a lot of perfectly decent flies hanging around turds for profit.

To celebrate my new, less jaded, view of of foodies here’s an interesting talk with chef Marco Pierre White. A man that speaks a great deal of sense. He reminds me of Hannibal Lecter. Minus the cannibalism and murder.

I don’t know if this has happened. I do not wear a tin-foil hat. Astrotufing is when you create the appearance of grass roots support artificially. It can be achieved in numerous ways on the Internet, much as in real life. For instance: One way to astroturf is to use coordinate a few people via something like an internet mailing list – or instant messaging – and have ‘on message’ commenting on forums such as the BBC’s Have Your Say section/Sky’s equiv., and discussion groups on the websites of newspapers. It makes economic sense. It takes very little time to do, you just need a few committed people with time, it gets a message to large Internet audience, and online discussions are increasingly being quoted in the traditional media. Either as examples of public views, or as part of audience interaction. If people are commenting as individuals there’s no problem.

But it’s easy for two or more people with an Internet connection to covertly manipulate a popular online discussion, and have their views disproportionately represented. This can be achieved with things like sockpuppet accounts. Sockpuppet accounts are Internet identities set up to give the appearance of another person. One person can comment in a single online discussion using multiple identities and the people reading their comments are none-the-wiser. So, for example, two people with three sockpuppet accounts each could appear to be as many as eight people. If someone running an Internet forum were to check their visitor logs they would see multiple people commenting from the same computer. But they could not prove they were the same people because in many homes computers are shared between members of a family.

On top of that there are things like Internet proxies and anonymising tools that allow people to mask where their internet connection is coming from.  Which is as it should be.

It does mean that Internet discussions should not be relied upon as being representative .  Ever.

Dispatches – The Truth About Beauty Creams is available online at this link but only through Windows Media Player enabled browsers.   It has five days left.   The thing most often put forward by pro-DRM types, such as Channel 4, is that they need to protect their ‘rights’.   Presumably that would work if programmes a) weren’t available elsewhere in non-DRM format, and b) the programmes had resale value that would be harmed by redistribution.  Dispatches is available in various places in a DRM free format (see, but, beware I haven’t checked the links for bad stuff), and Dispatches, while fulfilling a small part of Channel 4’s remit, has very little resale value.  So it’s pointless.   I really can’t work out why programme makers and television networks aren’t providing DRM-free downloads with hard-encoded adverts (adverts encoded as part of the original programme, rather than as part of a playlist).  Or YouTube-alike videos with hard-encoded adverts.  South Park Studios are taking just such an approach with their new player (although it doesn’t work in countries with decent healthcare systems, yet, presumably not to annoy television stations that have bought South Park in the last year or two).

From the funny to the rather tragic Winemouse.  Shame.

• Oil prices are rising because of speculation. The current supply, believe it or not (I don’t care), exceeds demand, even taking into account China. The speculation is a result of uncertainty and people moving into commodities (rather than equities).
• The rise in wheat prices are partially the result of increased demand for meat in China. Not a ‘western style diet’. More meat requires more food for livestock. But it’s not the principle factor. Last year there were several droughts. Not least in Australia. Similar things happened to major rice producing countries last year. Blaming China is wrong and misleading.
• There is not a linear relationship between inflation in China and the prices of Chinese exports. That would be overly simplistic in the extreme. China is going to suffer from inflation, but as a side effect of increased prosperity and modernisation. Rather than a simplistic relationship between food and oil prices.
• There is a weak causal relationship between biofuels and the price of food.
• Chinese imports are one of the factors that has helped control inflation in the UK. A minor factor given the percentage of Chinese goods as proportions of inflation indices.
• The Government measures of inflation are reliant on indices. So to say prices “on average have risen 3%” is an unwarranted generalisation based on an index. Real inflation may differ. A better phrase would be that prices tracked by X index have risen. Anything else is lazy.

With that in mind please watch the following:

What keeps inflation rising?

And ask yourself whether it did a good job. I think it is misleading and does a poor job of explaining things. One gets the impression that Richard Scott thinks the increased wheat prices are because of Chinese people eating vast quantities of toast.

If I here another news reporter saying the UFO files released by the MOD (available in PDF here) were in any way secret I will, compounded by a seriously bad back, throw something hard at my television screen. Shame on these guys. Firstly, anyone who even vaguely knows their shit, will tell you that the documents are largely unclassified (the lowest possible security concern) . Labels like secret and restricted have very specific meanings within government. And those UFO files are about as unexciting as it gets in terms of classifications. All the ’secret’ shit is bollocks. If they were some variety of eyes-only, caveatted up to the eyeballs, with crypto codewords, then it would probably be half as interesting as the press is implying about today’s release of UFO documents. People are strictly vetted to make sure they are boring enough to view such documents. The stuff released today is vanilla drudgery.

A lot of intelligence work is carried out by unsung heroes who quietly collate, analyse and disseminate, working in organisations such as the MOD’s Defence Intelligence Staff. During much of the last century the UK’s airspace was routinely intruded upon by Russian aircraft (no doubt we did the same to Russia). So it made a great deal of sense to log UFO reports and contextualise them in order to ascertain if the objects sighted were of defence significance. No matter how barmy. Or not entirely barmy: Many people spotting stealth planes, prior to them being made public (which sometimes takes years, and the prototypes may never be declassified), would, given the cultural collateral of ‘unidentified’ flying objects, view them as little green (or grey) men operating some kind of intergalactic free prostate checking clinic. Likewise a Harrier Jump Jet showing off, at night, viewed from 5km away. Or a missile test. Or atmospheric research that also provides handy surveillance platforms. Taxes at work.

So having a civil servant take reports between more important tasks makes sense. If a pattern emerges of some potentially unknown novel foreign aircraft regularly violating national airspace it is a major concern. The files were not secret, it’s more likely the reason some of the documents weren’t released sooner was a combination of laziness and stinginess. There are interesting bits buried in there, but if I can spot them, despite having the invisible Jolly Green Giant knee me in the back, I’ll be fucked if I’ll point them out. Do not ask me to point them out. I won’t point them out to anyone on principle.

FYI I think alien life exists and possibly super advanced aliens also (I was going to say super intelligent but then it dawned on me that intelligence is a very human concept). It’s just that the distances involved are huge and beings clever enough to travel faster than light (if it’s even possible), or some kind of time-travel (if it’s even possible), will likely have cleverer ways of studying intergalactic flora and fauna. In the event of time travel the computing possibilities are endless.

I like this sketch by Russell Brand and Matt Morgan. It’s been on YouTube for ages, but I haven’t linked to it because part of it annoys the fuck out of me. I like the randomness of the sketch and the spontaneity of it. Plus Gillian McKeith is seriously into shit. I am going to niggle. Watch it yourself here.

Three bits get on my tits: One – the lady looks in his direction, as he eats the shit, presumably her shit, but doesn’t react. (This is a little out of order given the probable budget) Two – the 29 O’Clock bit at the end. It’s just cheesy. If it was there to make sure people knew it was a joke, rather than a real MTV show, it’s a bit extraneous. Three – the direction was mental and the location sucked. On a bigger budget it would have been better, because the context of the sketch worked heavily against it, the room was out of place with the target of parody. Most life-style programmes have suburban chic. A suburban home setting would have done the trick.

I find Mr Natterjack’s Back much funnier because it’s much tighter (direction, editing), the setting is appropriate, and the sound track works well. It’s shock humour and has the feel of a short-art house film. I also liked the Daniel and Len sketches – they were totally inappropriate and out of context in the programmes they appeared in (which adds to why I find it funny, some of the people who tuned in may of been shocked) – but they were dark, man. They also could have done with been longer so the characters could have been expanded upon.

The best UK (sort-of) sketch show in the last few years is Snuff Box (watch a whole episode here). The locations are perfect, the soundtrack is perfect, and there are no more series. Presumably to make way for Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. The Snuff Box DVD, soon to be released, will no doubt be worth buying.

Dispatches – The Truth About Beauty Creams was good.  It’s good that Dispatches seems to be over the hump of mediocrity and doing something worthwhile.  Even the present (Tazeen Ahmad) seemed more switched on than the usual presenters (whose primary occupation seems to be obsessing about immigration, Muslims, and other things they think are crowd pleasers.  Thus adding to the hysteria du jour).   So well done Channel 4.  If only you had a Youtube-a-like, like the good bit of the BBC iPlayer.  I could post a link to it.   90% of sensible people,  a figure pulled out of my arse – but I suspect accurate – can’t be arsed with 4OD.

Edit @ a few days later:  The programme has been removed from listen again already.  So that link no longer works.

Click here to listen to Jon Ronson’s Radio 4 programme with Robbie Williams. It’s kind of a melancholy programme. One of the reasons I think Jon Ronson is so special is he lets subjects speak for themselves, unadorned. and respects his audience enough to let them make up their own minds. I agree with Brandon.

The situation with the BBC is not wholly of its own making. The corporation has been pressured to be popular, and, simultaneously, a public service broadcaster. And many people moaned when it was a public service broadcaster, during the patriarchal age of broadcasting. Now people are moaning that things have gone too far the other way. Quite correctly. My argument against popularity at the expense of quality is fairly simple: If the BBC makes programmes in popular formats, that are of the same quality as those available on commercial channels (or worse), there is nothing to distinguish it from the commercial channels. Making questions about the license fee inevitable. That is the situation today.

The assumption about an audience, needed to arrive at a conclusion of inaccessibility, is worrying. Accessibility is totally wrong. The most patriarchal thing since Abraham is that broadcasting needs to be accessible. I don’t necessarily think there’s an assumption people are stupid, but suspect there’s an assumption people are not interested in complexity. So, as a result, controversial issues turn into tabloid, bite size chunks, which alarm people irresponsibly, or presentation heavy documentaries, light on detail and low in accuracy. Maybe people being turned off by politics, science, the arts, and current affairs, is, in part, because they associate it with ‘accessible’ broadcasting. People sense that they’re being spoken down-to.

There should be an assumption that the majority of people are not stupid, and that complex subjects should be presented to inform. That is a different assumption from accessibility, because it assumes the viewers are intelligent and capable of learning. That not everything in a documentary needs to be so dumbed down it is accessible to the majority of viewers. People are capable of looking things up that interest them. The BBC used to produce decent fact sheets. As such there is zero replay value in many BBC current affairs programmes, and documentaries, because the information within them is so light very few people would have a problem with remembering their contents. Unless distracted by the special effects, and music track.

The BBC needs to compete to survive and in order to compete, with the other channels, many of whom are now producing documentaries of acceptable quality, the BBC needs to produce documentaries that are better. They desperately need to take a step-backwards. Until the late nineties BBC documentaries were the envy of the world. The BBC is the broadcaster best placed to attract the next David Attenborough(s) and needs to do that right away if it is to survive.

And the BBC could. Because the talent tucked away in places like BBC 4, a channel that receives a tiny fraction of the license fee and speaks for itself. Likewise Radio 4. Accessibility should be regarded as a failed experiment.

It virtually goes without saying that producing reality television, from talent shows to DIY, when everyone is doing it, makes the BBC less distinguishable from the commercial channels. Sacrificing long-term survival for short-term popularity. BBC 3 is, to my mind, schizophrenic, veering between sub-Channel 4 youth television, and, occasionally, decent drama/comedy. Half of what is on BBC 3 is done on commercial channels, and often better. I don’t think there is a dearth of talent – the talent is out there – the BBC needs to aggressively seek it out.

Someone needs a big brush to sweep away accessability and replace it with talent. Talent should reflect the subjects they’re involved in. There should be no more broadcasters covering subjects that leave them so out of their depth they look stupid.

Much of the above applies to the rest of the media but I don’t care about them as much as the BBC. I would like to be able to mock foreign friends about how much better BBC documentaries are than theirs. I felt smug when I could do that.

This.  I think the video demonstrates my point and I will say nothing further on the subject.

The recent stories in the press about high-tech dust that helped grow a severed finger back are nonsense. Furthermore they’re old nonsense. It will make you angry but today’s Bad Science column is essential reading and worth sharing. The stories of the ‘pixie dust’ were bad, in many ways, and on a very simple human level – there’s going to be people who, in desperation, will badger doctors for something that doesn’t work as well as the stories they’d seen in the press implied. When I saw the story this week I took a minute, and did a Google Archive search, it’s a little like LexisNexis (something many journalists have access to), and it turned up the following results:

Click here to lose a little more faith in humanity.

And, was somewhat perplexed that the story didn’t appear to be new, given the widespread coverage it was receiving, and that, furthermore, the finger didn’t appear to be severed in any sense of the word. I think Ben Goldacre is right to draw attention to such risible coverage from people we rely on for news. See also.

Tonight’s local election coverage on BBC News 24 is, aside from David Dimbleby, completely crap.  I am currently watching Jeremy Vine do a really shit American accent, dressed as a cowboy, reading out truly woefully described statistics about the Liberal Democrats.   It’s really difficult to watch.  It’s as if someone has decided that local election coverage needs to be fun.  Fun in the sense of   BBC Children’s Television fun.  My eyes feel soiled.  I hope someone puts the Jeremy Vine clip on YouTube because I did not make this up but doubt anyone will believe me.

It’s worth downloading the silly client to watch this documentary. The political background to the British nuclear program is an interesting glimpse of post-WW-II geopolitics.

Reality television, and derivatives, are mostly crap because they attract attention whores and drama-enhancing producers.  It rarely documents.

I think I’m on safe ground saying shows about people with ugly and/or embarrassing medical conditions, are a modern freak-show.  Especially reality television that deals with disfigurement. Such programmes often have fuck-all to do with the people they purport to document – I’m not being callous – it’s just that disfigured people are cheaper than actors and the make-up is better.  Quite often they get paid peanuts in the process. The documenting comes second to the sights and sounds. But…

If people can be desensitised to disfigurement, is it a good thing for disfigured people?  If viewers become desensitised to disfigurement, in real-life they will stare less, and, maybe, be less afraid.  Which would be a good thing.  However, given the tenuous and complex links between violent television and violent behaviour, it’s probably difficult to say that desentisation will lead to better treatment of disfigured people.  In the same way that it can’t be said violent television is ever the primary factor contributing to violence. I don’t think freak-shows, aside from supplying an income to the performers, improved the lot of disfigured people.  Still, I’m an optimist, I hope that there are positive side-effects to the modern freak-show.

A seriously negative side-effect of this, could be that in order to maintain viewers, medical reality TV will perpetually search for more extreme medical conditions.   In order to maintain shock value.  Like soap operas adding an explosion or violence.  Reality TV will  have to go to poor countries to find people shocking enough. Poor people with extreme medical conditions, on our screen, for titillation. Which, if it generates awareness of medical conditions in poor countries, isn’t such a bad thing.  The next thing is people may empathise. Tourist destinations may be shamed into action.  But..

It could still just be about titillation. I don’t, for a second, think that the majority of medical reality television is made for any altruistic reason at all.  I don’t think it’s immoral and I’m not even sure it’s all that harmful, but I do think it amoral, in that it boils-down to viewing figures, and best commercial practice.   Change will be in response to a changing audience.  I hope people become so desensitised to disfigurement John Merrick could walk down the street naked and people would be more shocked by his penis than his elephantiasis. 

It’s a sign of the fall of the West when people have time to sit in their underpants, and watch Fraggle Rock. The Wikipedia page is interesting and worth a read. Some Wikipedians know a great deal about Fraggle Rock. I find that amusing. Despite having read the page and remembered quite a bit.  Watch a whole episode here (p1, p2, p3).

That show used to give me nightmares.

The video of the interview with ex-Scientologist and actor Jason Beghe is on the tubes. I’m finding it quite difficult to follow because a lot of the jargon is unfamiliar to me. But this segment is worth watching because by the end it has more occurences of the word fuck per minute than a Tarantino movie. It’s fascinating from the perspective of an insight into Scientology (albeit from a apostate’s perspective – but he’s still a primary source). I quite like Jason Beghe, and sort of recognise him from some US television shows, he’s a bit like Frank Costanza (example) but nicer and with more fucks. See here for the background to it.

At the start of the popularisation of the Internet there were a lot of people with dubious Tank-Girl haircuts, William Gibson novel in hand, making wild predictions about Virtual Reality and the like.  Even William Shatner got in on the act with TekWar.   The days of the two Williams.  With the abundance of Internet mania it’s gotten a bit clichéd to go on about how the Internet is going to change things.

Adam Hart-Davis, if you can get over being spoken to like a 5 year old nephew, and his avuncular mien, made quite good documentary called “The Thinkynge Revolution” as part of his “What the Tudors Did For Us” series.  You can watch it here.  Although, of course, future historians may refer to the Internet Revolution as the Pornography Revolution and say things like “imagine if Caxton had done smut”.

Jon Ronson often respects the people he writes about and has empathy for the people he writes about. Here’s an article in today’s Guardian about Robbie Williams’ search for answers. I think that’s what it is. I suspect that Robbie Williams, given his experience with psychics, is on a road to scepticism, by a circuitous route. I think there’s a lot of people, like Robbie, who are intelligent, and looking for answers, and find out bit by bit that the paranormal does not stand up to scrutiny. People like Robbie are distinct from those who are deluded or refuse to hear counterarguments. He’s actively seeking answers and discarding things that he finds out are false. Given he was in Take That from aged 16, he’s probably playing catch-up. Robbie Williams is the kind of person that should be visiting websites like The Skeptics Dictionary and reading about critical thinking. To get both sides of the story, in a spirit of balance.

The Whitest Kids U Know need to be shown on BBC-3, Channel 4 or E4.  Pronto:

Tar Toast part 1 and part 2.

See also some very black humour here.

I would never poach a quail egg. Quail eggs are OK. Nothing special. Small eggs. You eat them and think “hmm. That’s OK”. I won’t eat hem unless someone else is buying them and someone else is cooking it. This isn’t an issue of snobbery. I feel the same way about black pudding. And beer. And newspapers. You don’t have to prepare beer unless you are opening a can or pouring it yourself. That’s preparation of a sort.

You can prepare newspapers by finding discarded newspapers on the train, scrunching the pages into loose balls, and putting them in a big pile in your back garden. Then joyfully spunk methanol all over them (from a spare lens cleaning kit), and set fire to them. Shouting “I’m burning the media, man – and I didn’t even pay for it”. (I have no respect for people who burn flags because, often, they’ve bought the flag. It’s mental). Then read the websites of the newspapers you have burnt without ever, ever, clicking on the advertising links.

Even if they’ve got a potentially good deal on a camera advertised or a featured book written by the sub-editor’s wife’s nephew. Then, much later, when the awful realisation dawns on you that you’ve made a Jeremy Clarkson/K Foundation-like statement (I suspect they’re one and the same). Hang your head in shame and drink Ribena. To wash down a fish-finger sandwich. And have a good hard think.

Whitest Kids U Know on conspiracy theories and eating a burger through a straw.

Human Remains.

Tom Green getting horrendously drunk in the name of comedy and doing some kind of obscure dance.

Simon Amstell appropriately interviews people. A man that makes Never Mind The Buzzcocks bridge the gap between shit and and funny.

would mean that I would wake up earlier on Sundays.*

Following link.

* Realistically speaking, being honest with myself, I misspoke when I typed that.  I’d almost certainly record it on Sky Plus or download it.   Or watch the repeat.

There are qualities that exist in all great film-drama characters that are hard to pin down. It is too simplistic to say that the characters have depth or complexity because some great film characters aren’t complex and don’t have depth. An element may be that while a part of a narrative, at some point in the film, (or even all of it) a great character’s motivations are not obvious to the viewer. So elements of the character are open to interpretation and the character is interesting as a result. Another factor may be the freshness of a role. As defined by the script and/or director and/or acting skills. A memorable character – because they’re novel and a benchmark by which others will be judged. And, I suppose, the pathos or revulsion the character can elicit from an audience.

All in varying proportions. Of course. One day a twat will paid peanuts to put together a shoddy equation for the benefit of a cinema chain. Who’ll pump out press releases on the unsuspecting public like bukkake. Mopped up by the news.

This post is defunct. The video in question has been removed. It was a Rolling Stones Cover so bad that comedy could not be derived from it. Deleting it was the right thing to do. I quite like Tay Zonday and all, he’s self aware – it’s a good act, but that was too much. He should stick to his own stuff, which is funnier, and tolerable to well adjusted ear drums. This post is not defunt. FFS x 100.

What follows this paragraph is yet another [1] reason [2] that copyright should be extended on music here in the UK. So pensioners like The Rolling Stones and The Who and Cliff Richard can maintain their royalties for stuff they did when they didn’t have bits of their bodies wearing out. Apparently they’ve “poured money into the British economy and enriched people’s lives” and “They are not asking for a handout, just a fair reward for their creative endeavours” according to Roger Daltrey. He has good hair. For an old guy. So he must be right. Plus, I like fishing.

One of the most excellent things were music copyright laws to be extended would be that bands like the Rolling Stones or their representatives or whoever handles that sort of thing can authorise things like this:

Tay Zonday does Start Me Up

I think we can all agree that extending musical copyright is a good thing. Like fuck.

[1] Bullshit.
[2] Cos there are no reasons. What reasons do you need? Oh Oh Oh Oh.

I like this classic because it sets up the next sentence, thus saving me words.   This can’t be distinguished from parody.   FFS.

“What you doing mate?”  “A nature walk”

Never before has the mechanical action of the human heart been made to sound so wanky. Lol. Watch Hard ‘N Phirm here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/lifestylenutritionists

It’s a fascinating history of lifestyle nutritionists – including funny fads that your great-great grandparents and grandparents may have known about.

You can comment to the host directly, not indirectly through forums or staff, but at his blog here.

Eating hoops is the “most disgusting thing I’ve ever done for my boyfriend”.

See also: Farm of Fussy Eaters.

More here.

The way of the road.

An excellent documentary about Richard Feynman.

I have nicked this link from Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog.

Sartre. (Backup link)

The Junkies. (DQ)

RB Videos from LA.

Heh. Russell Brand can sing, a bit, contrary to conventional wisdom. Shame about the fan vid. It’s like watching a peacock fidget around shrubbery. Hopefully someone will rip the scene from a pirated DVD screener. See also this Trey Parker/Alfred Packer classic, along similar lines.

Early Sunday morning I was listening to Russell Brand’s radio show and he mentioned one of his and Matt Morgan’s YouTube videos (The Weatherclerks) and how it’d only gotten a thousand hits. That is quite a pathetic amount of hits for a video that had been on YouTube six months. The problem is the way the videos were released. The first set of his unseen old-school (sort of old-school, post drugs) videos were disseminated via ‘Warren Kelp’ (an obvious sockpuppet) with some bullshit about the videos being found in a skip. That was all well and good, but the only people that would come across the videos were people specifically searching for Russell Brand. The largest proportion of his fans are ordinary people and are not going to do that. I saw the videos soon after their internet debut and featured them on this blog, but I, and people that come here (hello!) are elite internet ninjas. Many of whom have seen or heard of Russell Brand prior to the last couple of years (like me; he was funny out of his head on smack, back in the day in dingy Islington pubs, and he’s still funny minus the smack in front of audiences of hundreds. That’s a hell of a transition). Releasing the videos to the baying hordes, even with a celebrity name attached, is no good without doing internet basics like building up an internet audience (which is totally different from a telly/stand-up audience, and will become increasingly important in the next few years).

I think YouTube is proof that people will watch things that aren’t normally featured on television or the screen. Every celebrity should own a basic HD camera, such as the Canon HV30 (see note, it’s important), which produces good quality video without much technical complexity, or cost, or barriers to just switching on and filming. Buying a more expensive camera means more fucking around than is necessary, and nobody busy wants to fuck around. Buy a camera that doesn’t require training to use (the HV30 is excellent and produces excellent video). Film mundane stuff (people are interested in the mundane of any celebrity), stick it up on YouTube, build up some e-fame (which is like real fame, but with significantly less money) and profit. Videos a minute or two long. Below ten minutes of your life a week. Stick to basic editing, using the software that came with the camera, upload it to YouTube. It’s not difficult. Why more celebrities don’t do this is beyond me. Especially if they realise what the Internet is going to do to TV – like Tay Zonday does here. The time and money invested is minimal for hedging your bets on the Internet vs. TV question.

Then, the next time something like The Weatherclerks is released, far more people will watch it.

Note:

Canon: this is technically a plug I will sell my soul for a EOS 1Ds and a few professional lenses. I’ll even take the Nikon D3 off my shopping list for this year. In fact every photo I’ll produce this year with the EOS 1Ds will have “this was not produced by a Nikon D3” as an unobtrusive watermark. If, on the other-hand Nikon are reading this – quick – send me a Nikon D3 with several pro lenses – get there before the competition. It’s the first rule of business. There’s not many things I’d whore myself for, but for either one of those cameras I would cave in, contrary to the advice in this Bobby Conn video.

See also: My views on Scientology.

And more pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/Jack.Toerson

I’ve been watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the UK and US formats, and they’re funny. The funniness increases proportionally with the foibles and madness of the people running the restaurants. The formula is that Gordon Ramsay goes to a restaurant that is in financial trouble, and after much drama recommends that they:

• Find a niche
• Use local products
• Keep it simple
• Think about portion size
• Keep management efficient
• Fire or remedy incompetent staff

Which is every episode in a nutshell. With swearing and idents with whooshing knives. Mental people are well funny.

My favourite episode is apparently available here.  Because it all works out well.  Aaahh.

I have been mostly thinking about:

• Suicides In Bridgend, and
• Broken Britain, and
• Obese Britain, and
• Illegal Immigration, and
• Hospital Deep Cleaning, and

Other Such Problems; regularly capitalised by distasteful people wont of a conscience or brain. Cunts the lot of them. Basically, in a nutshell and to summarise, all of the above things are bollocks. As are Other Such Problems. People who believe in such things as big issues are ill-informed. People who don’t believe in such things, people that should know better, are turds. I have decided, as Lord High Ruler of this fiefdom of bollocks of a blog, that I know the answer to all of modern society’s woes. The problem with society is, in its simplest paraphrased form, a chain of thought that begins with:

• It may be bollocks, but …

Because what follows “but …” is:

• it suits us/me because, and/or
• it’s what people believe and I will make no attempt to correct them, and/or
• it’s always been like that, and/or
• there are multiple truths;

When

“it suits us/me because” – is basically saying there’s a lot of fucktards out there and we’re going to make use of them. Nasty.

“it’s what people believe and I will make no attempt to correct them” – is reasonable for religious belief or anything else that can’t be easily measured (provided it stays within its own domain). It is a piss-poor excuse for misleading statistics, blatantly untrue headlines, and politically motivated red herrings. It’s saying “hey, I know they’re wrong, but I’m not going to take any responsibility for correcting them”. Don’t stick your fingers in the plug socket dear.

“it’s always been like that” – an excellent excuse for sexism, domestic violence, racism, homophobia, and other shitiness. Which is exactly why it’s no fucking excuse. Anyone who uses that excuse is as bigger threat to Britain as a hooded teenager swigging cider and shouting at girls. I.e. Not that much, but quite annoying, and not that much use either.

“there are multiple truths” – but not when things can be measured, you fucking idiot. That is why we measure and quantify things. If something can be measured and you disagree with the results find a problem with the methodology or fuck off. Seriously. Fuck off.

See how many times you can spot “it may be bollocks, but…”, in any of its guises, today. Every time someone says something stupid, and we don’t correct them, we’re guilty of it. I was talking to a very wrong cab driver last week who began saying “prisons are holiday camps”. I just looked out of the window. His views are in-part a product of the newspapers he reads and the politics that he follows. How do you tell someone they’re wrong without getting thrown out of the cab? There’s an important philosophical point there.

But I could be lying and I may not of been in a cab. I could, in fact, have talked to a twee city gent about the price of black tea and how to clean marble kitchen tiles. A gent who knows a great deal about the prison system, having been incarcerated for stealing sixty diamond encrusted mouse-mats from a particularly tacky Swiss furniture shop (which is tackier and more expensive than anywhere else in the world). Although I could have made that up too. However, I was in a cab, and that one way conversation about prison as Butlins did actually happen.

Unless I dreamt it.

Do they have Toblerone in Swiss jails? And skiing?

No doubt there will exist, or has existed, a Swiss cab driver telling someone all about prisons full of skiers eating Toblerone. And their passenger may be looking out the window towards the Alps by night.

Fuck it. The end.

Imagine a world before science: a world of the supernatural - hunches dictating belief, of sun blotting fallacy.  For some seriously lolworthy quackery and pseudoscience watch UFO uHnters.  For fuck’s sake.

I don’t get people who upload copyrighted clips to YouTube by pointing a video camera at their television and re-recording the material.   The legal position is similar to someone who covertly records a film in a cinema.  The law is stupid, however, attempting to circumvent it by recording from a camera pointing at a television is also stupid.

Thought of the day

Celebrity news is thought to attract viewers.  Does it represent a net gain in viewers, or temporary gains?    How loyal is an audience attracted by the saga of Britney Spears?  Can main-stream news channels compete with dedicated celebrity news outlets?  Has diversification in the name of popularity increased or decreased viewing figures for all channels that have gone down that route?  Is there an niche for news channels that  provide quality analysis of important news?  Is it possible to diversify to the point that what distinguishes a news channel is gone?  Do Perez Hilton and TMZ do a better job at covering the minutiae of celebrity news than CNN or the BBC?  What happens when they, and entities like Heat Magazine, get their own digital television channels?

Bloods and Crips history.

Human all too human (Heidegger).  A cunt.  There are clever cunts don’t ya know.

Thought for the day

There is nothing vile about vagina.  Cunt is a deeply misogynistic word.  However it does have emotional impact.  If anyone has words with similar impact/utility that are less misogynistic please email me, I will use it instead.  I feel a bit of a cunt using it.