Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Where Once We Fought

Christ. What is there to say about the election? What is the point? There are empty spaces where the battlefield once stood...just a few trees bending over in a howling wind of imagined sound and fury. Indeed; the Great Debate is taking place in few homes tonight.

The passing of this campaign was swift and brutal. It came during the night when most of the electorate were asleep. Those who were awake – the night shift, pushing their hospital trolleys around and answering phone calls from lonely old women with fictional banking needs – may have glanced upwards and saw the great cloud pass overhead. It was dark and thunderous but silent as a corpse; it sucked out all the fun out of the political process, emptying heads to the New Labour standard of one part independence per million of dead air.

We are used to our present government and, as with the Rise of the Idiots explored in Nathan Barley, we can point and laugh until the sun goes down, but the Idiots will always Win. This is not as much to do with the Tory opposition as first impressions may lead us to believe. Their record in opposition has been poor, but they enjoy the position of being the default party of a deeply prevalent English mindset; and the memory of their last few years in power spent thrashing around in their own accumulated filth is fading. We are used to New Labour now and the new enemies we see under the bed and behind the nearby trees have obscured the old.

Some of these enemies are simply deformed shadows of those we once knew and were told to love in the eighties. They are the rotten chunks of capitalism that have spent many years decomposing in the sun, and are now being mashed up and served to us on a grinning plate...why do we suffer this? The filth accumulated by the Tories smelled repulsive and was hosed away in 1997 for a damn good reason. Now Blair has come to believe that we voted them out because they took a shiny, nice set of free market ideals and fucked them up, rather than the original ideals being corrupt in the first place. Blair thinks...no, he knows he can get these ideas to succeed, and wants to convince us that this business-centred approach to government is in our interests...and if a bunch of lobbying companies make a profit in the process, who gets hurt?

Well...we do. You give a scorpion a ride across the river and you will get stung.

It is unhealthy for both major parties to unquestioningly follow the free market faith because it effectively destroys all barriers to the pursuit of unlimited power and control. Without the debate, the balance between left and right, we lose any chance of questioning the power of big business; it is a Surrender. Our ethics now goes no further than whether companies are being treated fairly...the individual does not get a look in. Forget right and wrong...the only morality that matters is that it is Not Right that a perfectly adequate service has not been put out to competitive tender.

Sure, it is perfectly reasonable to allow freedom in the marketplace on a purely business level, but it is wrong to unleash the marketplace onto legislation and politics designed to keep us healthy, educated and treated ethically and fairly by society in general. Without any political voice of dissent, we end up divided strictly into those who are wealthy, and those who are fucked with no chance of reprieve. Businessmen do not work for love.

Ah, but we are wandering from the election. We were looking for reasons why Labour will win.

Have they cracked the political process? Is it that simple, that they understand only too well what to say to us and when, including catering for any contingency involving a Tory attack or retaliation? Perhaps not. Labour are still, despite everything, further to the left than the Tories. Howard mined a successful vein of right-wing prejudices when he held court on the subject of immigration, travellers and various other Daily Mail concerns...only yesterday announcing a tax on employers who give jobs to non-British workers. Blair finds it difficult to retaliate to these ideas without alienating voters in marginal seats. Politicians have long since lost the ability to put forward an argument of ethics...the only language they have is finance because this is what has always been most effective in swaying the undecided. And when your nemesis begins to chant the misleading mantra of common sense, how the hell do you put across the subtle ethical fallacies in his argument in a tabloid-friendly set of bullet-points for the ITV evening news?

Perhaps Labour has simply been lucky to have had a surfeit of good political thinkers in the last eight years, especially the ones who constructed the blueprints for the values of New Labour. Whether or not you agree with those foundations, they have proved scarily effective in many ways in these post-Thatcher and Major times. But one by one the Labourites fall out of favour. The party has been in power for longer than they expected and as new people replace the old they are discovering there was never a long term plan...now they are winging it and having to stretch out old ideas to cover the empty spaces.

And empty spaces are what the political landscape has in abundance today. Kilroy-Silk’s Veritas party is one big vacuum of thought with no policies beyond keeping a grumpy pensioner locked in the cellar lashed to the wall with steel cable, whom they prod with sharp sticks and regularly ask what really pisses her off about Britain today. Kilroy then waves his arms about until he gets the attention of a photographer before turning red in a righteous apoplexy on cue. Nothing but empty spaces.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are good people but the mindset they represent is never going to be a majority. And, sadly, their leader is not proving to be an asset. He is a good man but is not the right man in the present climate.

So we are stuck on this empty battlefield, bored and weary with the fighting of old and unwilling to make a stand for ourselves. What are the choices? How can we make a difference if the vote is wasted on manifestos we do not believe and futures that will not turn our way? We cannot all start new parties; most of us are not extraordinary. All we want is for life to work properly, for there to be an NHS and a way to get to work in the morning. But the debate is quiet now...all we are being offered is a month of cadaverous campaigning that say nothing and mean even less.

And all the personalities have been disappeared over the last eight years. It is the Business way...make sure there is nothing you cannot manage, document and control. The concept of loose cannons that voters respect and take to their hearts has been sacrificed on the altar of complete control. And so there is even less onto which we can latch. There is No Way In.

Labour will win. We all know this, and it may even be a close-run thing. But anyone who questions the apathy of the country on polling day should remember that even if you made voting mandatory and managed a 100% turnout, most people are simply tired with it all. They feel like they have been beaten to the point of death by modern politics, and believe that no matter which party wins, they lose.

So now what?

Thursday, March 24, 2005

Maybe Some Small Amusement

Michael Jackson boarded the tube next to me today. He has been late for his court appearances twice already but this took the piss... I looked again and saw that it was not Jackson but a white woman dressed in what appeared to be a Salvation Army uniform. It was uncanny... The fact that she was accompanying a young boy is neither here nor there.

This followed a similar unlikely look-alike recently; a photograph of Tony Blair giving a speech was in the papers the other day and his head looked like a cartoon avocado from the ancient computer game Wiz ‘N’ Liz. I will admit that this has little significance to anyone but me but what the hell...the average working day is made up of small amusements bobbing like apples in a bucket of water, and you have to take a bite whenever you get the chance otherwise you will slowly drown.

Yesterday in the office we took amusement in another suspect package...and not because of the danger to the public. True, there may be evil riding the tracks here, but sadism is a rare beast. The actual amusement came in a moment of self-realisation as we stood at the window watching a heavily protected policeman investigate the package.

“Okay,” said one colleague. ”So the front of the station has been evacuated, then.”

“Yup,” said another.

“And Starbucks.”

“Yup.”

“All the shutters on those shops have gone down too.”

“Yup.”

There was a short moment of thoughtful silence. “So, er, how come we’re standing here about twenty foot from the bomb, then? If it goes off, we’re fucked.”

“Yup.”

“They always forget about us. Oh well...a bit of excitement, isn’t it?”

Some amusements are greater than others and they tend to happen outside the workplace. Desperate Housewives has become one of the most enjoyable shows on television...and I will not become defensive about this because, despite the show appearing to be targeted at pretty much anyone but me, it is brilliantly written and great fun. And it comes complete with an excellent theme tune written by Danny Elfman, who has spun many threads in Hollywood as well as being responsible for The Simpsons’ theme tune. What’s not to like?

Even so, when I tell people I like the show they give me a Look; their eyes pop out on stalks to the sound of an ancient car horn being enthusiastically parped. All I can tell them is to watch the damn thing and judge for themselves.

This kind of fulsome praise for the show has been all over the Internet like a rash over the last six months. Many people see the praise and are instantly put off and this included me at first. I am suspicious of anything described as water-cooler television, but the show has crossed every divide in terms of audience and I am happy to beat the drum for it for people who are still reluctant to dispel comparisons with the awful Sex and the City.

Nevertheless, this initial reluctance on my behalf resulted in me missing the first episode when the premise of the show was set up. The show’s narrator is a character who commits suicide in the first episode, and I would have been confused for weeks over that if there had not been so much press about the show. This is betting without the “previously on” section that many American shows have tacked on to the beginning, but I always find those things confusing when I first start watching a show and do not know which character is which.

But I have done this before. I saw American Beauty at the cinema in Coventry and the sound was missing for the first five minutes. Despite the screamingly obvious references throughout, I had absolutely no idea that Kevin Spacey was going to shoot himself at the end...which, of course, is what initially kicks the film off. It certainly put a new spin on the film.

American Beauty was the baby of Alan Ball, who went on to create Six Feet Under, the only show at the moment that puts Desperate Housewives to shame. I could write about Six Feet Under for pages but I will spare you the tedium and instead come to a close by saying these are precious amusements that must be cherished. I am willing to try anything once, even if the omens are poor...before Six Feet Under, the idea of watching a serial drama – any serial drama – was tedium itself.

Well...the obvious Moral of the Day would be to say something terribly humourless about open-mindedness and such, but this would be so insulting to all of our intelligences that it would probably blow up the Internet, so I won’t. Instead I will point out that elephants can mimic sounds just like birds and then, enigmatically, leave it at that.

Monday, March 21, 2005

Failed Vibes at Speakers Corner

"There is of course a widespread belief that Speakers' Corner is some kind of "nuthouse", where "cranks" and tourists go. This idea is widespead, particularly amongst those who visit it only once." -- from speakerscorner.net.

Walking through Speakers' Corner at Hyde Park the other day I was told by my companion that there was a hippy who frequently spoke there, and indeed used to sing before the Man turned up with his ugly threats and whipping sticks.

“This guy thinks the world can be saved by green,” he said, as I sipped my coffee.

“Green? Some kind of environmental nut?” I said.

“No...green. Just green.”

“The colour green?” I said.

He nodded grimly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you think he would sell us some grass?”

Then the guy appeared through the swarms of people...he was a sad and lonely sight in a world dressed in lacklustre Next gear. A slightly hangdog and whiskery face sat upon a wiry body clothed in true LSD-fried sixties casualty gear, and the whole thing was completed by a pair of – what else? – green trainers. But as he began to preach his message the crowd was growing fat and it was increasingly difficult to make out what he was saying. We left him making peace V-signs and we walked on.

The problem of making himself heard was the case for the other speakers, whose voices interwove into one swirling white noise of indignation. You expect a certain level of extremism here, though; so you do expect some crazed gibberish to rise above the noise and lure you in. But the quality of the bellowing was mixed and it was clear that there were winners and losers here.

In one case the speaker appeared to be no more than a taxi driver up a stepladder. Give a tiresome bore an additional two feet of air and you suddenly have an opinion leader... This was not my idea of hell and brimstone rains of verbal fire...this was the jabbering of a foolish blowhard and we soon strode on. Another speaker was an unassuming Oriental gentleman who, in a weedy voice, was saying something about Jesus being the way. There was a circle of damning emptiness surrounding him and I did not want to get close enough to listen in case he bothered me personally with his useless rhetoric.

The whole place felt heavy with failed religious vibes and we soon grew weary. Speakers Corner has an important heritage and will continue to be important, but there are days when the cranks and tourists jibe rings true. The sense of place that day felt thin, all the more so because we live in a country where we are bombarded with opinion from all directions. We are never sheltered from this constant bombast...so when you see a taxi driver on a stepladder the feeling is not “what on earth does he have to say?” Rather, it is “here we go again”.

But the message, perhaps, is the least important part of the experience. Most of these preachers fall at the first hurdle because they either fail to put on a good show, or if they do manage this they forget to include the audience. When you have a hundred people around you, your message means shit if they are simply staring in bewilderment and giggling amongst themselves at your wacky hairdo. Out of the speakers we saw only the taxi driver was engaging with the crowd. So even though the debate was tedious and hackneyed, the audience were lively and receptive to the slanging matches that frequently caught fire.

Ah, but when the audience is more entertaining than the speaker...then can the speaker claim a victory?

Well...neither of us really cared and we walked off to Oxford Street to find something to eat.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Terror Twilight

Have Tony Blair and Gordon Brown come to an understanding or was it just serendipity? Days after the thirty-two hour wrangle between the houses of Lords and Commons over Blair’s terror bill, Brown let the waters clear with a budget designed to reassure the country and keep the city nodding in mathematical understanding.

This may just be self-preservation on Brown’s part. Even he would not sink the entire ship just to have the pleasure of watching Blair drown. And the waters run deeper than apparent at first glance; Brown was unusually quiet during the entire terror bill fracas, quiet enough to keep the sharks from circling. So whether he is going it alone or was being consciously on-message, he knows he must behave himself or else he will soon need to find a bucket and start bailing.

The budget has already been analysed and re-analysed, so I will not repeat the details here. What I will say is that we need to prevent the budget from being delivered close to an election; no matter how reliable the chancellor appears, the spectre of party politics will always haunt the sums. This seems fairly obvious but who the hell would pass such a law? It is a great weapon for the incumbent party and nobody would dare volunteer to disarm, even if it does carry the risk of blowing up in their own faces.

So have we all conveniently forgotten about the prevention of terror act now that we believe a compromise was reached? Ah, but who was interested in the first place? If the country was universally against it then the opposition would still be beating Blair over the head. But no matter how much the bill was hated by opinion leaders, the Fear of Foreigners cannot be discounted. This Fear is a widespread plague and is the perfect right environment for draconian government measures against a supposed Enemy to thrive. But the chief factor in this is that many, many people will have heard about the bill and shrugged, thinking it did not affect them...it is not About Them, it is about Others. So, they reason, why not bring on the injustice and give those darkies hell?

It is the same with capital punishment. String ‘em up, they cry... “They”, of course, are upstanding citizens to whom state punishment is an abstract concept...except when they nearly brain someone else's children to death in their too-fast cars and thus getting them a speeding ticket. But apart from this, to these people punishment happens elsewhere and it really does not matter that a bunch of strangers are killed. And to hell with whether they are guilty or not.

Okay...I am stepping hastily away from that sidestreet.

Returning to the budget, the speech lasted fifty minutes and ended with a crescendo of crowd-pleasing. This is to be expected, although how much impact the speech itself makes on the voters is undecided since most people simply pore over the bullet points in the subsequent papers. But Brown knows the budget is a thing that stands sweating in the spotlight. It is not some late night drone in a near-empty Commons. He has to make an impact...not to plump up his own position but because he knows that how well he performs on the day will guide the political ship for the next few weeks. A crucial point to remember so close to an election.

But until the climax of the speech the budget was its usual plodding self. To liven it up without obscuring the message would be difficult but not impossible...what Brown needs to do is to deliver the speech in a stadium, his main points illustrated with the kind of massive picture-based score board you see in American sports. Needless to say, an organist would accompany him.

There would be a half-time show. Backbenchers would dress up in massive pound signs and march around the stadium to the tune of Pink Floyd’s Money. Then the opposition would pop up as a choir in the stand singing Simply Red’s Money’s Too Tight to Mention. Then a parade of chimps would unicycle past, for no other reason than the fact it would be funny. The show would be topped off with the 1812 Overture playing over a fireworks display, and may or may not involve the Elephant of Doubt being launched into the air with half a kilo of dynamite stuck up its arse and a radio receiver so that it can be remotely detonated. Cruel, yes, but this is a momument to capitalism we are staging here...so don’t give me that do goody-good bullshit.

What? Oh dear. Anyone from the RSPCA please disregard the previous paragraph. And anyone who knows about money, please disregard all the other paragraphs as well. It’s a kindness.

Monday, March 14, 2005

Generic Pretentious Post Title about Railways

Strange tales today from the office regarding the weekend...something bad has happened in the staffing ranks. I cannot give a full account because it would not be Right. But the ingredients are enough to give the right flavour here; a gun for sale, a loan shark, six burly men and an ex-member of staff who owes a lot of people a lot of money. Threats have been made, doors almost kicked down.

And things are going to get uglier before they get better. Soon the police will be involved...but for now the dark focus of these weird events has gone off sick today with a possibly contagious illness.

But I am insulated in this office away from all that...all I have to suffer is the bureaucracy involved. It is unfortunate, then, that this office is actively making me sick. At the same time every day, around eleven, I feel like shit and have to go find myself some fresh air. Now what the hell is going on here? This happened all last week and now this week. Above me there is an air conditioning unit that pumps out recycled air, and I have to assume it is taking in some air elsewhere full of some bad substance that, for some reason, is released to the world at the same time every day.

One thing is for sure, and that is the existence of a dark underbelly round these parts. An entire subculture of intimidation and desperation that remains mercifully out of reach to us office types, but is a visible presence in the ranks of the station staff. Theft and corruption stalks the gatelines and the company is unsure how to tackle the situation except to hope the bad ones are weeded out over time.

And there is something about the railways that makes these observation obvious...the atmosphere is tangible, the crumbling viaducts over sodium-drenched city roads, the ugly steel spaghetti lashing together distant stations, iron grey boxes at the side of the rails drenched in silly macho graffito tags...

Somewhere, somewhen, miles away and in a quite separate dimension, there is a notion that rail travel is romantic. This does not tally with my experience. Certainly not in London, where stations are surrounded in vicious spikes and endless spirals of barbed wire, topped off with a hundred soulless cameras watching you picking your nose and scratching your balls. Subways beneath the rails are ponderous and twisty and full of drunks. Paint, slapped up to cover previous graffiti, is now peeling and covered in its own bad scrawls. And in the main stations a million dead-eyed commuters dance around one another all cursing that stupid old dear who decided to travel across London with a hundred suitcases during rush hour.

I am one of those dead-eyed commuters. And I have narrowed down all the bad experience to one square yard in the whole of the network...the one point, the evil locus, the focus point of all that is twisted and wretched. A small area that sums up everyone's lousy thoughts and horror stories shared over a beer that night. It is the square yard that forms the junction of the corridor in Victoria Station – just after a tiny two-gate gateline -- that splits one way to the Victoria Line and the Eastbound District / Circle Line, and the other way to Westbound District / Circle Line. It is impossible to pass this point. A pile-up of tourists, pensioners and idiots will sit there in a huge seething mass of bad humanity, all clueless and utterly unaware that anybody else in the world exists. To them, only their minor dilemma matters, so there they sit and stare at the signs, whilst a thousand people scream their name in futile protest..."fuck off! Get the fuck out of it, you halfwitted turd fuckers!" And the bloodbath begins. With any luck...

Well. I seem to have hit one of my own nerves there. But seriously...if you were unsure what route you needed to take, would you not take a couple of minutes to study the map...perhaps doing this whilst waiting for your next train instead of mouthing off how long you're having to wait? Would you not give the damn thing a tiny bit of thought? You would and you should.

On the other hand, if you were on a motorway and were unsure whether you should take the next junction, would you screech to a halt in the middle lane, get out and spread the atlas on the bonnet? No, because you're not a complete nitwit.

Railways do bring out the worst in people. Even now, after years of neglect and utter contempt from the top regarding the system, we find ourselves surprised at what fresh hell we have to put up with every day. So we get tired. We get passed the point of sighing heavily and staring pointedly at our watches. We get passed the point of "accidentally" shoving slow people on the stairs out of the way. We get passed rolling our eyes like washing machines on the final spin. And we take a deep breath, rub our hands together, and write a really stern letter, goddamn it.

And occasionally we get a free 7 day travel card back in compensation, and we are happy again. Until tomorrow, of course.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

That's That Sketch Knackered Then

Whoops. They're not leaving any more, leaving my post yesterday adrift in a sea of lying toss.

Still...the Comedy Store Players were even better than I had expected. It would be a useless waste of time to attempt to review the thing...it would be tediously effusive and much too long. All you need to know is that it is an evening of perfect improvisation and it is on every Wednesday and Sunday night at the Comedy Store, London. (here)

Suffice to say that I would forgive them anything after the part of the show in which they improvised a half-hour musical based on a title that I shouted out... King Death remains forever mine and I salute them for it.

That's it. As you were.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Not Everybody Leaves

In the next few weeks some of my work colleagues will be moving to new offices somewhere far away, and they include the people I talk with the most. I knew there would be some kind of move at some point, but I assumed the entire population here were being relocated somewhere better. Today I know different, and the clouds are beginning to gather.

Well, what can I say? The work here is only just bearable as it is...and for the first few weeks after the move my immediate boss will be away on a course. With tumbleweeds about to blow through the office, dogs staggering around and then lying down to die, ceiling fans spluttering to a halt and distant banjos plucking a melancholy note, I am sorely tempted to abandon my post.

Having looked around I believe there are some much better hourly rates out there if I find an employment agency with interesting specialisations...perhaps IT, or media office work. My CV is reasonably solid, so I am assuming I will be able to find a new job before the money runs out in a vast waterfall of rent, bills and tax. But this all requires some kind of forward motion...and I do not feel the motivation right now.

At least I now have broadband access at home and this will make searching for jobs and agencies almost bearable.

Hey...stop nodding in a knowing fashion and thinking the word ‘porn’, goddamn it.

So the next few weeks may turn out to be important ones for me. Motivation through boredom is hard to achieve because of the silence that grips you both in your head and externally; there is no push to get you going. Perhaps I will just stay here until something happens and I am forced into action. This is the path of least resistance and I hate myself for travelling it...but we shall see.

Tonight, however, I will be able to forget all this. I am going to the Comedy Store to watch some damn fine comedy with a couple of friends. I have been hoping to see the Comedy Store Players for many years and I doubt that I will be disappointed now I am finally going. Hopefully this will be the start of something regular... now I live in London I know it would be absurd not to take advantage of the great choice of stuff to do in the evenings.

Now all I’ve got to do is make sure the money keeps coming in.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Satire Dies a Death in Hell’s Lounge

Oh god. From behind the wall comes the sound of a ringtone...a rendition of These Boots Were Made For Walking tortured through the John Shuttleworth lens... It sounds terrible and in an ideal world would be followed by some kind of explosion.

Our society is a noisy one and getting noisier, while in the meantime stress levels continues to rise. There is a connection there. We are changing all the time...technology mutates and evolves constantly; it is a bullet that cuts through us all and we all have to chase after it just to stay still.

On the back of this our societal norms are in a state of flux. We do not have the time for the water level to find itself...so by the time we adapt to how to behave in a civilised manner somebody throws a new stone into the pond. We became used to making mobile phone calls in public and have slowly come to find ways of not behaving like smug gobshites, and then new phones come out with hands-free, or videos, or whatever...and everyone behaves like fucked hyenas all over again. The world curses the early adopter and then follows his lead before bowing their heads in shame...and the cycle just keeps repeating.

But that is not what I am trying to write about. Now, somehow I must segue into complaints against television. Hmm...well, both subjects are connected by this idea of how society reacts to something that changes things, at first with an extremism that manifests itself simultaneously in both directions...i.e. hostility from some and love from others...before slowly being adopted by everyday life with its sharper corners filed down. Ideas never seem to be rejected outright...perhaps because the truly dumb concepts disappear before coming to wider notice, unless you work for ITV. If something turns up that is controversial and provokes intelligent debate, the smart money is on the idea staying around and over the years taking its place as a building block for further explorations into the contentious.

So...Channel Four showed a programme on Sunday that looked at television shows that draw complaints. The amount of swearing in the programme means that the programme itself is likely to have logged many complaints.

People react with fury to these things, missing out inconvenient details simply because their anger is a long-held belief that Cannot be Challenged. If a programme is controversial it is shown after the watershed, but people still complain that the scary content was not flagged up. If a programme shown after the watershed with warnings plastered over it like a rash people then complain anyway. This is a strange drop of acid in the televisual well; not the question of why a programme draws complaints, but the question of why the complaints miss the point the show is making. It happens too frequently for comfort and can be normally seen when a programme is satirical.

So why do complaints miss the point with satire? We can split the possible reasons into two categories...one for people who deliberately miss the point and one for those who do it by mistake.

The latter category is easy to dismiss in some ways but do indicate that, however well intentioned, some people take everything at face value. Should we take these people seriously if they become offended, even if we see them as being Wrong?

Well...not really. Fuck them. The world is not a simple place and sometimes we are challenged. Television is no different. If we spoon-fed the country with nothing but face value simplicity we would end up withdrawing so far inward we would disappear into a single point with a pop. And if you are truly so stupid as to believe ‘Til Death Us Do Part is a rallying cry for right-wingers, then you would be generally be too damned stupid to know how to use a telephone to register a complaint anyway.

There are a similar group of people who don’t even watch the show they are criticising...or criticise it in advance because they fear they will not agree with its message. Let us save time by kicking them in the balls with no right of appeal and move on.

Some people know full well that the programme they are criticising is satirical. Some will be complaining on behalf of other people who may not understand, which is a stupid situation and is easy to ignore because you can only take a complaint seriously when a person has taken offence and wishes to complain. Someone who thinks someone completely different may be offended can be laughed at and maybe even killed a bit.

But others are media-savvy. They understand the point that the programme is making and realise that it is the opposite of what they think, which of course is highly embarrassing to them. An intelligent programme making an amusing point about how stupid they are is never going to tickle their funny bone. So they wish to take their revenge. They may, for instance, deliberately take the programme at face value so as to provide them with a reason to complain...which means they are intentionally acting stupid. And this means they can be ignored.

Ah, so we seem to have dismissed all possible complaints about anything outright...right? Of course not, otherwise I would not have phrased the question in that silly knowing manner.

This is where we enter the grey area. Some satire uses strange and unpleasant vehicles to drive their point home...unlike, say, Bremner, Bird and Fortune. They are excellent comedians, but their vehicle is uncontroversial; we are simply laughing at something that flags up a famous person doing something we regard as Wrong. However, much of Chris Morris’s radio and television material has been of such a nature that means it is not the point he is making that is being complained about -- although, as before, this may be the catalyst for complaint when people feel humiliated by the message -- but what he uses to make us laugh in the meantime. We laugh at his list of euphemisms for paedophiles in the Brass Eye special not just because it satirises idiotic tabloid language but because the phrase shrub rocketeer is in itself funny.

That is a mild example of my point and it is easy to think of more extreme examples that result in what may be termed guilty laughter. This is the raw material with which the smarter complainers have a field day. However, we risk plummeting into a full-blown debate about the nature of humour here and that is a matter for philosophy far beyond my own tiny thoughts.

Well, quite, and the temptation here is to say to hell with it and cite something about the ends justifying the means. A little guilty laughter to make a wider point is nothing compared to the damage done by full-on comedy routines about the stupidity of, say, other races. (And note that this is not an issue of political correctness because that term is meaningless and self-satirising. If something is cruel and has innocent victims then it is a Bad Thing.) Yet...and this is where the argument gets stuck in a stupid and tedious eddy with no escape...the idea that a little sin is okay because a big sin is worse does stick in the craw somewhat.

But we must return to the Channel Four show about TV they tried to ban, or risk some kind of absurdist loose-end explosion. The show trod some familiar territory with a voyeur’s eye for swearing, nudity and bad taste...but in one section it listed the three most complained about programmes in British TV history. And out of these I believe that the complaints for two of them have utterly missed the point.

The third most complained about show was Derren Brown’s seance. The complaints missed the point that Brown was debunking the methods of charlatans, instead claiming that the thing was an exercise in evil in its purest form. They seemed to have forgotten that Derren Brown is an illusionist. And that he insisted at the start and at the end of the programme that this was an illusion. So the complaints came across as muddle-headed religious masturbation and were fallacious at best. To hell with them.

The second most complained about show was the episode of Brass Eye mentioned above that covered the subject of paedophilia. The point of the show was that media hysteria about paedophiles was out of control and resulting in acres of insane lies, exaggerated fears and hopeless hypocrisy. The resulting media hysteria, along with a (then) record-breaking complaints postbag, proved nothing but the ability of the media to miss the point (something that is deliberately to play on and whip up fears and sales) and instead claim that we are all sick for, in this case, laughing at the issue of paedophilia.

But we weren’t. We were not laughing at that. The mirror Chris Morris held up to the media’s reaction was funny because it showed them up for the surreally and comically absurd shits that they are when thundering about this or that. Nobody who watched it thought that it is Funny to rape children. Nobody. Nobody.Case dismissed.

Ye gods, this is going on forever. This was supposed to be a short post based around how amusing it is when satire has the ability to make idiots furious...ah, well. Only one more programme to go and we can put this thing to bed.

The most complained about show to date is Jerry Springer – The Opera. Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, yesterday put his point across about the angry religious reaction to the opera’s showing on BBC2.

”Our duty is not to be swayed by short-run moral panics or claims about this trend or that trend, but rather to consider the issues around broadcast objectively and dispassionately as we can [...] There is sometimes a sense of competitive victimhood, especially in the matter of religion”. – Mark Thompson.

Indeed. And many people complained about the show in advance...which, of course, lets us break out the balls-kicking boots and go a-walloping.

Myself, I enjoyed the show, and I consumed much wine along the way. But there were quite a few people who complained after they had watched the show. In this case I am willing to allow these critics some leniency. At least, some of them...the ones who did not miss any points, the ones who felt their religion was being mocked. This is a valid reason to make your voice heard, no matter what the rest of us think about the concept of religion. It is reality we are dealing with here, and our reality contains a hell of a lot of religion.

Whether the complaints are right and compelling or not is another matter; I happen to believe that the BBC were right to show the show. But in this case the white noise of these complaints cannot be dismissed, and need to be factored in to any serious debate about the programme. Debate keeps us on our toes, and there are usually winners and losers in such circumstances. And in this case the BBC won...but they did not keep a clean sheet and this is why the situation is so interesting.

Although not interesting enough to write another word about it.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

The Culmination of All That is Elegant

I have been buying ever more ridiculous sounding tea recently. The first step on this strange path was at work where I noticed that a colleague preferred fruity herbal “infusions”. Normally this would send me running for the hills, leaving a post-it note behind with the word “Jeeee-sus” and a picture of a pair of rolling eyeballs written on it. But I was sick of the endless cycle of PG-Tips and rotten instant coffee, and was willing to be seduced. Now I buy variety packs of the stuff, although I am still embarrassed about exactly how to describe it to others.

“Hi, what are you drinking?”
“This? It’s an infusion.”
“Piss off, it smells.”

I have also decided to drink green tea. I do not remember why this was a good idea…whether it was a sudden and pathetic burst of aspirational shopping or just some watery-eyed stab at Being Healthy. I drank it with lemon at first, and now I have discovered an orange and lotus flower version…ye gods. Somewhere along the line I have sacrificed common sense for absurdity…lotus flower? Am I drinking things that live on lakes now? Or I am thinking of something else?

There is a fine line between genuine open-minded consumption and middle-class faffery, but until I find myself drinking something I don’t like and pretending that I do, I will consider myself in the Right.

Indeed. But today I completed the circle and bought a box of white tea based entirely on the fact I liked the box. I have never heard of white tea before, and the reasons for purchasing it are worrying.

Upon the box is written a stream of advertising consciousness, quoting nameless Chinese Emperors and puffing up its ability to “detoxify”. But what the hell? It tastes like it claims on the packet and it only takes a small mental leap to indulge my love of Deep and Meaningful atmospheres alluded to in my previous post…this time the clue is in the title of Swirling Mist White Tea. Nothing beats a good bit of bad weather in a foreign country for an instant hit of vaguely pretentious gratification. And the name is embellished in the windy bumf on the box and I am willing to swallow it all because I am shocked to find I really enjoy drinking the stuff. It is awash with smooth, subtle flavour and I endorse it heartily.

Some products go above and beyond their duty to entice the weary shopper. Sometimes throwing around fashionable phrases like low-carb doesn’t work… you need a cartoon picture of a man with his head on fire telling you that this chilli sauce is the hottest sauce known to man, as is the case with the charmingly titled Who Dares Burns sauce. But I refuse to take dietry advice from a dying cartoon character. Many chilli sauces claim to be hot but the claim is arbitrary and silly. Who Dares Burns does, indeed, turn out to be dog-kickingly hot, whereas Molten Lava chilli sauce from Bicks is little more than a slightly irritating tomato sauce. Meanwhile, Tabasco sauce makes a useful ingredient but a disappointing sauce, chiefly because of its vinegary taste.

Tabasco is a product that likes nothing better than to conjure up in buyer’s mind some kind of link with the soul of the American west, or whatever. Jack Daniels does exactly the same kind of thing by alluding to comfortable images of the old American south. And it works. Without the myth, the mental stimulation, the product seems ordinary. Yet we must not rule out quality…if the stuff was no good, we would buy something else, no matter how fancy the packaging.

Except…and this is an argument I am desperate not to even begin writing about right now…we buy shit from supermarkets over and over again that tastes of nothing and puts people out of business left, right and centre. The average tomato from your supermarket is so desperately sad…rubbery and tasteless and with an appearance that looks like a child’s idealised painting of the real thing…yet this is what we’re happy to buy.

And now we insert endless drones about convenience versus quality, price versus ethics, and blah ourselves stupid until hell freezes over. Just not today, eh?

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Lonely Weeds Bloom on Tarmac Fields

Do not go looking for that crock of gold, my friend. In this twisted world there is something else in that crock and you will not want to melt it down for currency. And the leprechauns are on the retreat and have to conduct vast underground bare knuckle boxing matches with oompa loompas to make ends meet. Flesh and gristle will fly in the chocolate factory tonight...they will not be spinning their magic here any time soon.

We are running out of lost places and legends...most places have been found, the trails clearly marked and guide books printed up. And as for the rest, most of the time they turn out not to be lost but stuck in snow on the East Grinstead line.

Hold on...that’s work intruding into this stupid bubble and I can feel the headache coming on already. There are no lost places at work...unless you count the station where one member of staff has been stripping naked at night and pleasuring himself in full view of the drivers... Hell, that is a terrible thing to lay before someone in the darkness of a long, cold night in March. So let us lay the word “allegedly” like a wreath across this thing and leave well alone.

But there are some places that remain smothered in mystery. There are people out there who may be able to explain the cold truth behind their existence but it is equally satisfying to wallow in our ignorance for a while. Legends are what keep us going and without them all we have is Newsnight.

Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: What I did at the time was to take all the information at my disposal and come to a mutual solution that we were both happy with and it was Doc who...
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: ...made the decision in the first place but Happy was grinning that stupid grin of his during the whole...
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: ...stupid debacle, and the whole thing has left me feeling grumpy every day, which means on top of everything else I’m now up for sexual harrassment...
Paxman: I’m sorry to keep asking this but...did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: ...and I didn’t say anything because I would go bright red and my hat spin off into the air in comical fashion...
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: I didn’t touch her, you know. She fell down the stairs all by herself.
Paxman: Did you threaten...what?

Lost places are explored in the films and stageshows that are, of course, our modern myths. We sit and marvel and wonder what lies under the floorboards of the creaking house, what lies in the evil parallel dimension (and we’re betting without a clone of yourself with a shit goatee), or just what lies somewhere over the rainbow...

But wait. We will never find ourselves somewhere over the rainbow. Let us spoil the myth by crowbarring in some schoolboy physics...of course, the rainbow does not exist in an absolute location, but relative to the viewer. Any concept of a location over the rainbow can therefore only exist relative to the rainbow. But the relationship is not transient...you have a link to the rainbow, the place over the rainbow has a link to the rainbow, but it does not follow that you have a link to the place over the rainbow because in effect the rainbow exists in pure relativity and so for our purposes we must treat it as two independent rainbows amongst an infinity of the damn things. We all have our private rainbow, as does the place over the rainbow, and nobody but you has access to its existence. So you can never get to the place over the rainbow, unless you run really, really fast, or have an identical but evil twin with a goatee beard, or something.

So what is this place somewhere over the rainbow? The obvious answer would be Oz...but for the real answer we have the examine the film in detail, in which the mysterious place over the rainbow turns out to be some kind of pie weighing shop. The lyrics are clear:

“Somewhere over the rainbow,
weigh a pie.”


This evidence is conclusive and we do not need to investigate further.

Most places, though, are mundane and have become lost through the reorganisation and rebuilding of cities over the years. Streets end up lost and broken amidst the sewers after new buildings have been built on top, and cellars are bricked up to form strange tunnels and mysterious doors appear that are forever locked and begin to look like doorways to hell...as explored on a well-known website. If I remember I will throw in a link once I find my way online tonight.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that whatever lies behind the wall is sure to be dull. Ah, but what kind of dull? So long as we cannot see for ourselves our curiosity is roused. Especially if there are a bunch of cool-looking pipes belching steam involved, or you can just about make out a couple of grimy shapes in the darkness through the cracks of a whitewashed window. Letting light in on the truth is pointless and will inevitably lead to a face full of dust...all we need is the original sense of mystery.

Although this applies mainly to ordinary places to which you do not have access...other people’s houses you will never see inside, or factories in the middle of the countryside with huge piles of strange rocks outside. The true lost places have the thrill of being illicit, sacred ground, a trespass.

Abandoned places have this built-in allure because the walls echo an unknown past and each new room throws up new questions and clues. Why was it abandoned? What if there are creatures down here? What did I just stand in? And will I need a tetanus shot? And never underestimate the joy of waving torches around in the darkness. The X-Files managed nine series based on this fact.

The mystery does not end with the unknown content of a boarded up warehouse. It blossoms in the melancholic atmosphere of a place abandoned by humanity to the weeds and the beams of winter sunshine that pour in through the gaps between slats in the roof, sheets of discarded metal rusting in a courtyard of broken concrete and fences. There is a sadness here, a tiny taste of something more epic and ultimately heartbreaking. You sense that something here has come to an end, and, unlike your average Hollywood film, endings in real life always leave scars on our flesh. When we feel the vibrations of other people’s endings some of the sadness begins to rub off. We feel the tears well up and feel the urge to whip out some panpipes and lament the hell out of one another.

But the strangest feeling is reserved for the knowledge that the very existence of this place is an enigma. Our lives feel trapped inside routine and stifling organisation and yet here is a place unclaimed, a place between the cracks that no paperwork seems to be able to account for. How the hell did this place vanish from somebody’s computer screen...or why is it they wanted to press the delete key? Is there a story of tragic loss and financial irregularity that would leave Nick Leeson’s story gasping for breath like a beached octopus? Or did they simply lose the keys to the bulldozer?

Finding a lost place is not always a good idea and the events of gritty factual drama Brigadoon bear this out. The plot of the thing is intriguing and is a good example of finding a fresh and oblique angle to a tired concept. Brigadoon is not a hellish lost town from which you desperately want to escape like in so many bad fantasy plots; it is the polar opposite, and yet in its own right as horrifying as any crazed western outpost Clint Eastwood ever rode into, or a spaceship full of alien menace, or even the Village of The Prisoner. It is a lost place that needs to be found, which makes it unique.

In my previous job there was an abandoned place right there on site. Old, unused offices that now lie derelict and dangerous. I was taken there in a hardhat and visibility vest and shown around, and the sheer lifelessness of the place was overwhelming. On every wall there were endless wires that burst in spectral clusters out of square-cut holes and led nowhere, there were pieces of paper on the floor bearing phone numbers using long forgotten area codes, and the whole place generally just felt...sad. The architecture that would have been impressive in the dying years of the Victorian era now seemed grubby and inefficient and vastly ugly. Life moves on, businesses grow, shrink and die, and nobody lasts forever. Things change.

Here at my present job we will be moving eventually, leaving this grim offices behind and moving to somewhere that has windows. As yet we do not know what will become of the building we are in. I suspect whoever owns the thing will want to wash their hands of it. We would not wish this place upon a dead dog...perhaps in ten year’s time it will become a lost place and self-styled urban explorers will be storing photographs of my useless Windows 95 laptop on their nitwit Nathan Barley-esque phones.

Good luck to them. Maybe I’ll leave a colourful note behind the desk for them to find. What larks!