we've come too far to give up who we are....

There's a documentary series - Hospital - on at the moment that was filmed at the beginning of this year at the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham. It follows the staff and patients of my local hospital as they struggle to cope with the demand of a particularly brutal winter. Watching it is an emotional experience: I get a surge of pride when I see what a wonderful institution the NHS is and how these dedicated staff are able to give the best possible care they can to every patient, but I also get very angry when I see the impact that decades of cuts are having on this service and how they compromise that care at every turn. They say that the more direct experience you have with the NHS, the more you appreciate it.... but it's heart-breaking to see the impossible decisions that doctors are forced to make when we simply don't have the resources to provide the right level of care.

This week followed a surgeon who specialised in head and neck cancers. He loves his job and had extended a six month posting to cover eighteen months, but he was working in a ridiculous short-staffed department of two surgeons (when there should have been four). With his wife already working as a plastic surgeon in the USA, he took the decision to give the department five months' notice that he was going to leave the UK and follow her. Although the NHS is a wonderful and precious thing, he said, in the USA he would have the time and resources to provide a better quality of care to a smaller number of patients. What he didn't say was that this care would only be provided to those with the insurance to be able to pay for that care... which, for all of its failings, is not true of the NHS, even if it's what some of our politicians seem hell-bent on delivering for us.

During the course of this week's programme, we watched this same consultant being asked by the camera team if a delay to surgery to one lady had played a role in her cancer becoming inoperable. Conscious that he was being filmed, he picked his words carefully: well, it's difficult to say for sure and absolutely impossible to prove... but if someone had told me that this is how my mother had been treated, I would be very angry. Enough said, I think. The lady herself was heartbreakingly phlegmatic: "I'm old, I've had a good life, done everything I wanted to do and been to every part of the world I've ever wanted to visit...". I was in pieces watching this on my sofa.

As chance would have it, I was in QMC myself this morning. I stopped injecting Avonex after the possible allergic reaction that I had in January, so this was an appointment to check in with the MS Nurses and the consultant neurologist to decide what we do next. A trip to the MS Clinic is sobering: as I walk into the clinic, I look around the waiting room and see people with walking sticks and wheelchairs. This morning, one lady arrived in an electric wheelchair, accompanied by her carer. She had a big head support that held her head in place, and when she tried to speak to the nurse, she was only able to communicate with moans and grunts rather than actual words. I try not to think about it very hard, but this is what the future might look like for anyone with multiple sclerosis. Meanwhile, I was warmly greeted by the consultant with a cheery "Ah, it's the patient who runs marathons!" I'm a fairly unexceptional runner, but I certainly stand out here.  (My wife would also probably like me to point out at this point that the consultant then apologised to her for not remembering this, but she looked athletic, so was she a runner too? She was thrilled. If an eminent medical professional thinks you look athletic, then.... well, you must be.. right?)

As we left, C. asked me how I felt. I've got a few decisions to make about whether I want to resume my injections, or if I want to continue taking nothing and six monthly MRI scans to check that my disease is continuing to progress as slowly as it has seemed to for the last ten years. Do I want to go back onto the treatment I've been using for the last ten years, or do I want to roll the dice?  It's a tough one.

But how do I feel? Honestly? Well I don't know if I know the answer, or if there are any right answers here, but how do I feel?  Lucky.

I feel lucky.

I'm running the London marathon in a couple of weeks; I'll also be running the Liverpool marathon in May too. We're raising money for the MS Trust. At my appointment today, the nurse who saw me was trained and partially funded by the MS Trust; the leaflets that we were given to take away to help with our decisions are written and produced by the MS Trust. This small charity provides a crucial support to the medical teams that support patients with MS, and they provide support and information to the families of people affected by the disease. I'm so proud that I'm able to do something to help them continue their work and to continue to support the NHS and people with MS.

You can sponsor us here!  The money that you good people have donated so far will make a massive difference to the lives of people with MS and their families.  No one should have to go through this alone.

https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/Team/TCK

in the desert you can remember your name...

My wife left home on Friday to work the weekend before her big conference this week.  Since she's been away, as well as work as normal on Friday, I've guided my friend Terry around parkrun and then took him to catch up with friends in the cafe for a bacon cob and a cup of tear. I've attended a three hour rehearsal for this week's end of season concert with Choir and had a quick pint with a friend before coming home to fix a(nother) puncture on my bike - that's three in four days now.  I've also completed a few domestic errands, topped up my wife's supply of artisanal fruit beer (she's very particular) and done the weekly shop.  I've even been out running twice and managed not to fall over.

I've also watched thirteen straight episodes of Breaking Bad season 5.

That's perfectly normal, right?

What's probably not normal is that I'm not going to watch the remaining three episodes in the season before going to bed tonight.  Given the way the episode I've just watched finished, that's pretty remarkable.

You've seen this already, right?  You know this is good and that I should have watched it years ago.... well, better late than never.

spasticus...

Do you remember the special adverts that were commissioned as part of Channel 4's coverage of the Rio Paralympics? There was an all-signed ad-break during The Last Leg, but there was also a notable series of Maltesers adverts.  Here's a bit from the press release:

"Mars Chocolate UK will launch a new series of adverts for the MALTESERS® brand that champion diversity and disability. They will be broadcast for the first time on Channel 4 during the 2016 Paralympics Games Opening Ceremony tomorrow evening (7th September).

The new ads, created by Mars Chocolate and AMV, are the latest in the MALTESERS® ‘Look on the Light Side’ series and were developed in response to Channel 4’s Superhumans Wanted competition. Mars Chocolate UK and creative agency AMV won £1million of the broadcaster’s commercial airtime for developing a bold, creative idea which puts disability and diversity at the heart of their campaign.

The series comprises three ad creatives, all inspired by real-life stories from disabled people, celebrating universally awkward situations; from embarrassing moments with new boyfriends to behaving badly at a wedding – where the best thing to do is simply look on the light side of life."

New Boyfriend

Dance Floor

Theo's Dog

I loved them.  "New Boyfriend" in particular had me double-taking and then laughing out loud because it was so funny and... well, because it was so filthy. Watch it for yourself.  I thought they were great because they seemed to be doing something that we don't see on television all that often: people with disabilities being shown as normal people who talk about normal things and, instead of having people treating them like they're made of porcelain, we seem them making jokes about themselves and their situation.  American Dad has been doing this for decades, of course, but it seems somehow revolutionary to see it on an ad break on Channel 4... even when these adverts are sandwiching the incredible sporting achievements of the superhumans.

Anyway, a couple of months later, the Guardian has put up a comment piece on these adverts. They're not a fan, at least not unreservedly:

"First, without restraint, a big cheer for the actors. Disabled actors – they exist after all. And are doing a great job here. Three all at once in an ad campaign, coming along just like buses. Out in the shiny mainstream world, Metro positively drools and declares the ad has been “widely lauded”, and quotes a viewer from Twitter: “Best Maltesers advert ever!!”. On the Maltesers YouTube page, the comments range from hilarious, to worried, to downright weird – perhaps presenting a grim equality of sorts.

"It’s bound to get messy. It’s about selling a chocolate product after all – and is it really worth some of us feeling unhappy? It does grate on me given that the advertising industry is part of the capitalist agenda. And sadly, featuring a few disabled actors in an advert isn’t really likely to be a major skirmish in its downfall. Nor is it likely to explode barriers and negative attitudes. Or is it?

"Lisa Hammond, who plays Donna Yates in EastEnders, said: “All of the actors in the ads are great … that they are all women makes me happy. The issue is the fact that every one of the adverts’ focus is impairment, as part of the story. We’ve been banging on about this for years – feels like we are in a perpetual loop! And I’m interested in the deeper story.”

"I know what she means. I’m always interested in a deeper story. But this has parallels with the way that race is always the issue in the representation of BAME people on screen. But I don’t want to be forever a bloody issue – only an issue – even if it’s just an advert."

Hmm.

I'm not disabled - or, at least, I don't consider myself to be disabled - so perhaps I'm not attuned enough to see the problem with these adverts.  I find it very easy to believe that, if this is your life, then your radar is probably a lot more sensitive to these sorts of nuances (...goodness knows I'm sensitive enough to *any* passing mention of MS in the media or on the telly).  To be honest though, these are adverts, and what advert ever made managed - or even tried - to create a rounded picture of someone and their life? I'm inclined to think that the very fact we're having this sort of conversation about these adverts shows how far we've come... we're talking about the sex life of someone in a wheelchair, for goodness sake! (hats off to the advertising agency for getting such an obvious reference to ejaculation into an advert, by the way.  I can't think that I've ever seen something like that in an advert before, able-bodied or otherwise).

We've doubtless got a long way still to go, but we certainly don't lock disabled people away any more because they're not fit to be seen in decent company. Not in this country anyway.  Not at the moment, anyway.  Who knows what will happen after brexit.

As the great Ian Dury sang:

Hello to you out there in Normal Land
You may not comprehend my tale or understand
As I crawl past your window give me lucky looks
You can be my body but you'll never read my books

They played Spasticus Autisticus at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics, actually.  It still makes people gloriously uncomfortable, and there's power in that.

stranger than fiction...

I’ve been watching the West Wing again.

Well, I say “again”, but really it’s another one of those programmes where I’ve watched a few and made a mental note to watch it all, and then never quite got around to it and didn’t want to watch the new series on TV because I was behind… I finally bit the bullet and bought the whole lot on iTunes the other day. Say what you like about Apple, but the convenience of being able to pull down a series like that, episode by episode onto your chosen device is pretty much unbeatable, in my books (if you’ve ever manually ripped a DVD into iTunes, then you’ll understand exactly why.)

It’s such an amazing programme. It’s obviously a preposterous liberal wet-dream, but with the current state of world politics as it is, I find that kind of thing remarkably comforting. Plus, of course, it’s beautifully written and performed. I doubt that President Trump’s staff in the White House would look anything much like this lot… but, then again, has any White House staff ever looked quite like this lot, with their good looks, talent and principles? Doubtful.

Of course, there’s one element of the plot that is resoundingly more significant for me now than it was when I first watched the show: the issue of President Bartlet’s multiple sclerosis. I haven’t really got far enough into the series yet (we’re just starting S2) for it to really have taken off… but already it’s there, waiting to blow up as a central issue: a major health problem that the sitting president has effectively kept totally secret from the public. I find the show’s handling of the disease fascinating (why on earth does Abbey Bartlet feel the need to disclose the MS to the anaesthetist in the hospital? Would anaesthetic work differently with relapsing-remitting MS? Does the incoming president not have to have some kind of medical on taking office, or do we rely entirely on their honesty? Please tell me that we wouldn’t just be taking Trump’s word on this)….but I also find it incredibly moving because it is now directly relevant to my personal experience. I watch Martin Sheen’s Bartlet looking tired and weighed down by his responsibilities, and I watch his wife and his chief-of-staff watching him, wondering if this is something else…. and I find it very moving because it’s so close to home. Well, not the being-leader-of-the-world thing as such… the other stuff.

This is a show that often has me welling up as they shamelessly manipulate my emotions, but now I find myself emotionally connecting with the show in a way that I hadn’t really expected. I expect they’ll get lots of the details wrong, but I’m still looking forward to seeing how sensitively they handle this as the show moves forwards. (No spoilers, thanks).

At its heart, the West Wing was just areally, really good show. It’s impossible not to look at President Bartlet and wonder if someone like that could ever actually get elected: erudite, principled, educated…. there’s one scene in the double-episode that starts the second season where Leo McGarry, trying to convince Bartlet in a flashback scene that he should stand for president, turns to his friend and says, "A good man can't get elected President - I don't believe that.”

I’d love to believe that was true, but my faith is wavering. It was a comforting thought at a time when George W. Bush was in the White House, but it seems like a ridiculous pipe dream now (Let Trump be Trump? The mind boggles)

Or perhaps my impossibly high standards for elected officials and their staff comes from a love of the West Wing.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

How much Latin do you think Trump knows?

lord above...

When Nadiya Hussain won the Great British Bake Off last year, people went a bit crazy. We live in a time when many (stupid) people associate Islam with terrorists who burn people in cages and blow people up with homemade bombs… and here was a lovely, charming lady in a hijab baking cakes in a big tent. She seemed nice and loved her family and everything.  Imagine! And she won! Well done Britain. What a bloody lovely, inclusive country we are, etc. She even baked the bloody Queen a cake for her birthday. Well, for one of her birthdays, anyway.

Lovely Nadiya, living embodiment of how wonderful Britain is, has been given her own TV show. It’s called - working title at least - “The Chronicles of Nadiya”.

Do you see what they did there?

Well, perhaps it’s just me, or is it a tiny little bit odd to name a show presented a Muslim after a series of books that are well-known Christian allegories? Aslan is JESUS, you see….

Am I overthinking this and just spoiling some REALLY CLEVER WORDPLAY, yeah?

Maybe she just presents the whole thing from inside a wardrobe surrounded by fur coats.

I’d watch that.

hope....

“You think, okay, I get it, I'm prepared for the worst, but you hold out that small hope, see, and that's what fucks you up. That's what kills you.” (Stephen King)

Did you catch last night’s Panorama: Can You Stop my MS?

It followed some patients with MS who are undergoing a pioneering cancer treatment to try and treat their relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. It was one of those programmes where the very science involved was utterly terrifying and wonderful at the same time: they blast you with chemotherapy to encourage the release of stem cells from your bone marrow; they harvest the bone marrow to access cells that were formed at a time before MS manifested itself in your system; they blast you with chemotherapy again to destroy your immune system completely; they then put the stem cells back into you to “reboot” your system with a copy from before you had MS. Sounds ridiculous, but some of the results were astonishing: from wheelchair to walking and cycling and swimming again in less than a year. Not only does this seem to halt disease activity, but it seems to roll back disability too. The holy grail.

I found this a difficult programme to watch. One of the patients featured had been a marathon runner and triathlete who had gone from immaculate physical specimen to a wheelchair in the course of 8 brutal months. His positive attitude and his remarkable physical improvement were truly wonderful things to behold and had me on the edge of tears several times. The programme offered hope, but it also showed how cruel this disease is and how quickly and indiscriminately it takes hold. I know that I’m one of the “lucky” ones. I’ve got my problems, but I ran a marathon last year and I’m training to run another one this year… but it’s hard to think how quickly this could all change. Perhaps, thanks to a treatment like this, this could all change. Perhaps no one diagnosed with MS will have to go through this sort of thing again. This was a programme that made me realise all over again what a wonderful institution the NHS is. This treatment works out at around £30,000. That sounds like a lot, but that’s about the same as the annual cost of the drugs I use that are *maybe* slowing down my disease progression. According to the MS Trust, this treatment might have advanced faster if there was anything in it for the drug companies…. But of course, if they fix us, they can’t milk us ongoing, so they haven’t invested. Luckily for us, the NHS isn’t driven by a profit motivation, and they are pursuing this line of treatment.

Hopefully, this treatment will represent the future for people diagnosed with MS – for those with progressive forms of the disease as well as those of us with relapsing-remitting forms. Who knows? What we can say for sure is that, after years with no hope of a cure and an uncertain future, there’s some genuinely encouraging news of a treatment that might help us bring about the end of this damn disease. We have tangible cause for hope.

After hearing about the programme, my comrade-in-MS, Steve Domino, pointed me in the direction of this little beauty by Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

As Napoleon Bonaparte apparently said, “Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment”

bad to the bone...

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to boxsets, I have the best of intentions. The last few years have seen loads of quality tv shows, but if you’re anything like me, you miss the start and, by the time you’ve heard they are worth watching, you don’t want to jump on part of the way through and decide that you’ll just watch the boxset whenever that comes out. And then never quite get around to it. I’ve been fully intending to watch the Sopranos from start to finish for probably more than a decade now. I haven’t watched a single episode yet. I’ve done a bit better with things like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The West Wing, in that I’ve watched bits a pieces of them here and there… but I keep meaning to watch them properly, but still haven’t got around to it. I did watch Band of Brothers from start to finish when it was first on tv, but I still have the box set of the follow-up, Pacific, in shrink wrap next to my DVD player.

The arrival of streaming video services seems to have helped. Amazon Prime offers a number of shows that I want to watch, and I actually sat down and worked my way steadily through all three seasons of Vikings over the last couple of months, and it was great. Ridiculously, it felt a bit of a wrench going back to a physical DVD after streaming, even though it’s barely any additional effort at all to put a disc into the machine to watch three episodes. Luckily, I was able to overcome that absurd inertia to start watching Breaking Bad last week, a box set that I have had for a couple of years now.

Surprise, surprise…. This critically acclaimed TV show turns out to be really, really good. Who knew? I’m now working my way through at a rate of a couple of episodes a day.

I was a little taken aback at how dark it is, which is daft because I knew what the basic premise was before I started watching. But somehow it still took me aback, with a real turning point being the scene with the bathtub in the second episode. It’s gripping. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before?

One thing though: If this was set in the UK, it wouldn’t have lasted for five seasons.

I’m not sure what’s next….. Sons of Anarchy, maybe (which I think is on Prime), I probably ought to bite the bullet and buy the West Wing too. Parks & Rec, maybe.

How on earth did we watch TV before? Adverts.... WTF?

dulce et decorum est.

I've already written once about this year's batch of Christmas adverts, and before we're even halfway through November, here I am again.  My reason for picking up the subject is that I've just seen the Sainsburys ad.



It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, depicting the 1914 Christmas ceasefire at the trenches.  This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, and this is pretty powerful and timely imagery.  You can see just how seriously Sainsburys were committed to getting this right by the fact that they have made the advert in partnership with the Royal British Legion.  It's a powerful piece of advertising.

But it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable.

Why?  Because it is a piece of advertising.  It's masquerading as something more significant than that, but for all of it's message about how Christmas is for sharing and why-can't-we-all-just-get-along, what it's really trying to get you to do is to spend your money in their shop rather than in another one.  Yes, yes.... so you can buy the chocolate bar featured in the advert for £1 (which compares rather nicely with the £95 that John Lewis are charging for Monty the Penguin), and all of the profits from that are going to the British Legion (with precisely none of the Monty the Penguin money going to charity).  Well done everyone, you've knocked John Lewis into a cocked hat.  Except that John Lewis aren't really pretending to be anything more than a retailer in their advert.  Yes, they're manipulating your emotions and trying to make you feel all warm and fuzzy about a little boy and his CGI penguin, but they're not trying to hide that fact, are they? We buy into that: we want to believe that Christmas is more than just a festival of greed and consumption.  We sing songs about silent nights and peace every year, and it's maybe even true... for a few days, people seem a bit nicer to each other.  You might get a bit ratty with your parents and your family, but basically people do try and see the people closest to them.  It's all an illusion, of course.  People are still cold and hungry on the streets; people are still being murdered and wars don't stop.

And that's the thing: wars don't stop and this is what makes this Sainsburys advert so awful.  You remember that famous scene in Blackadder Goes Forth where they're all about to go over the top and the guns stop firing.  Just for a moment, they think the war might be over:

Captain Darling: I say, listen - our guns have stopped.
Lieutenant George: You don't think...
Private Baldrick: Perhaps the war's over. Perhaps it's peace.
Captain Darling: Thank God. We lived through it. The Great War, 1914 to 1917....

There was a ceasefire in the trenches at Christmas in 1914, and troops from both sides met in No Man's Land and played football.  Then, a few hours later, they were back to trying to kill each other and continued to try until the war was over in 1918.  Nothing changed.  Then we did the whole thing again in 1939 and in who-knows how many other wars.  Yes, we are all just people and yes, it's clearly insane to try and settle our disputes through force of arms.... but that hasn't stopped us.  I find it unbearably poignant watching this advert and seeing the two young soldiers from opposite sides introducing themselves.  When they know each others' names, how can they possibly go back to killing each other?  But they do.  Whilst Sainsburys doesn't show us Otto viciously bayonetting Jim or Jim blowing the top off his chum Otto's head, it happened.

Happy Christmas, old boy.

Well done with the advert, Sainsburys, but don't you think that imagery like this should be used more carefully than just to deliver an emotional punch to a Christmas advert for a grocer?  Don't you think we owe the fallen a greater respect than this?

This advert is tasteless and cynical.
--

MCMXIV (1964) by Phillip Larkin

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

--

On a completely different note, am I the only one who watched this advert and thought of the video for Pipes of Peace?

[It seems that The Guardian doesn't much like this either:
"In helping to launch the ad today, the legion’s head of fundraising praised the film’s historical accuracy and attention to detail. How true can this be? While there were certainly varying conditions on the frontline from place to place and year to year, reading contemporary accounts from either side of the trenches, in the poetry of Owen and Sassoon or the prose of Remarque, the details that stick in the mind are horrific. Nowhere in the new advert do we see the blood and entrails, the vomit and faeces, the rats feasting on body parts. The response might be “well they can hardly put that in a Christmas advert can they?” and that would be entirely true. Which is why the scene is entirely inappropriate for a Christmas advert in the first place."]

lost like some forgotten dreams....

In case it might have escaped your notice, Christmas is coming. 48 days and counting. In the course of a single day in the office last week, I head “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses playing on the reception PA no fewer than three times. I don’t think it’s on a loop, but it seemed to be playing every single time I walked past. It wasn’t even bloody November.

I work for a retailer, and we’re naturally desperate for Christmas – or at least Christmas shopping – to start as early as possible and to last as long as possible. We had our gift guide published and our gift range out in our shops at some point in September and have been anxiously wondering why our seasonal offers weren’t flying out of the stores as the country basked in the warmest October on record. Well, at least we don’t sell jumpers and coats.

We had a big event in the office yesterday evening to launch the new Xmas advert. Apparently, this is quite a big deal, with everyone desperate to have *the* advert that takes off on social media and gets everyone talking. The John Lewis advert from last year, “The Hare and the Bear” hardly featured a product at all, but it was really the only ad that anyone was talking about. Our advert is better this year, and our leadership were clearly very proud and dished up mulled wine and mince pies as they premiered it to us (our hashtag seems a bit like the desperate attempt of someone who has just heard about "The Twitter", but it's not as bad as Debenhams' attempt this year... the Frog Chorus!  I ask you! And selfies? really?)

….but let’s put it this way, it’s probably better that they showed it to us last night before John Lewis launched their advert today. Our guys talked about creating a “social media thunderclap” and asked us to share the ad on facebook and to use the hashtag (seriously, do they know what the reaction of my friends would be if I shared something like that?). John Lewis barely need to do anything to get people excited about their advert, and apparently TV channels were involved in a bidding war to have the honour of being the first to premiere the advert. With barely any effort at all, it seems… and a mere £1m on the advert and £7m on the campaign… they look to have won again with a very cute advert indeed (if the sex trafficking of penguins is your thing). They don’t mention any products in their advert again this year, but if you look at their website, you’ll see that they’ve *created* a market for penguin stuff. There’s an app; they’ve lined up with Barnados for their storytelling charity and with the WWF over the adoption of actual penguins. They’ve got this shit covered. They are capitalists though, so if you want a large Monty plush toy? Yours for £95. Boom! Christmas owned.

Of course, all this or any other Christmas advert is really trying to tell us is this:

Capitalism, eh? It’s all about the kiddies.  Merry Christmas.

time for primal concrete sledge....

I've been watching a documentary on Sky Arts called "Metal Evolution".  I stumbled across it completely by accident, and it was originally aired in 2011, so it's not exactly new, but I've been watching it avidly ever since.  Basically, it's a guy who drew out a series of family trees of where he thought heavy metal music came from and how it developed, and then went around the world interviewing the people involved.  Each programme is based around a theme: new wave of British heavy metal or thrash or grunge or hair metal or whatever and then tells the story, tracing the origins of the sub-genre and working through the key bands and how it developed.  The theme music is "The Trooper" by Iron Maiden.  I was hooked immediately.

The first programme I watched (episode 3) saw the presenter in England following the thread of bands in the late 60s and early 70s who evolved from the Blues into something much heavier: Deep Purple, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Cream, Led Zeppelin.  It's gripping stuff, although I've particularly enjoyed the episodes on the NWOBHM (inexplicably pronounced as a word by the presenter, and sounding something like nu-wob-ham) and on thrash, where we follow the bands that I grew up with and who formed my gateway into metal: bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica and Anthrax.  Even the hair metal programme was interesting, if only to remind you how ridiculous and vapid most of those bands were, but also to see how the emergence of a "real" band like Guns n'Roses killed the scene almost stone dead overnight and how the members of those bands then really struggled to make ends meet.  I ended up having real respect for some of the survivors (if not for their music or their fashion sense).

The episode on grunge was fascinating mainly because of the way that almost every grunge band went out of their way to deny any metal influence (which is clearly nonsense when you listen to something like Alice in Chains or Soundgarden).  It seems that hair metal made a lasting impression on these guys, and in their jeans and plaid shirts, they were keen to avoid any comparison with their spandex-clad near contemporaries.  Also amusing was the scorn of these guys for the second wave of gruge bands who followed once the record companies went sniffing for more of the same in the wake of the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the like: all tried to sing like Eddie Vedder (apparently that's called "yarling") and all were fairly crap.  Creed seemed to be the subject of the most scorn, which reminded me of the story of when their fans who tried to sue them after a live show because they were so awful.

Anyway.  It's a good show, and the next episode I have on my sky box is about "Nu" metal... Rage Against the Machine and the likes.  Should be good.  Worth checking out.

One consequence of watching the show is that it's had me scurrying back to my old CDs and loading the likes of Anthrax, Slayer and Pantera onto my iPod to listen to at my desk at work.  I first heard Slayer back in about 1988, and they're not half as heavy as I remembered them being, but they are seriously good.  I'm not sure that being caught singing "Raining Blood" out loud at my desk would be a good thing, but on balance "Fucking Hostile" might be worse.

Rock hard, rock heavy, rock animal.

\m/ 

reflector or director?

I watched Game of Thrones last night.  I've tried hard to make what follows spoiler free, but if you're following the programme and you're not right up to date, then please approach with caution.

Still with me?  OK.

I watched the latest episode, "The Viper and the Mountain".  Then, as I usually do, I headed over to the Guardian's series blog for GoT to have a look at what other fans of the show thought.  The show airs on Sunday night in the US, and the blog usually goes up straight after that, but as we only get to see the show on a Monday night, there's already been a few hours to get the discussion started and there's already a lot to catch up on.  It's one of those blogs where, if you can read between the trolls and the smug book readers wanting to discuss things that haven't happened yet, the readers are as interesting as the author.

Pretty early in the discussion, DMcCool had this to say:

"I have to admit this was the point where I finally "got" Game of Thrones message, the Red Wedding had enough clues in it here they really rammed the message home. A horrendously bleak and grotesque view of humanity and an obsession with everything gruesome and ugly.The level of gore and constant brutal deaths for every sympathetic character carries GoT over into the realm of the SAW films. After coming close at the end of the last season, I think this was enough for me, I'm finally off the ride. I don't want to spend any more time in this joyless and cruel world. The saving grace of this episode (and in my opinion the best scene this season by a mile) was surely the conversation between Tyrion and Jaime, and the flashes of actual friendship there, but it is far too rare a thing in Westeros; everyone is either a psychopath or a bleating victim. It's just a horribly nasty view of humanity; it's humanity stripped of humanness with just the dull statistics "so and so killed so and so for such a political reason" left. [plot point redacted to avoid spoiler], but then GRRM has to play his one trick again and kill [a] character in the most gruesome and horrible way he can think of. It's getting old, and I can see where this story is going. I finally committed viewer suicide and spoilered myself to kill off any curiosity, freeing me from this joyless and depressing fantasy world."

You know what?  I actually kind of agree with him.  I'm not a prude and I have been known to enjoy 18 certificate films from time to time.  I'm not going to stop watching the show, but last night's episode really excelled itself in the utterly gratuitous amount of violence and gore displayed on the screen.  I knew what was coming because I've read the books, but I was actually still shocked by what I saw depicted on the screen.  These images didn't just flash up on the screen, the camera lingered lovingly on them the way that it sometimes lingers on the also-fairly-gratuitous (mostly female) nudity.

Listen, I know that G.R.R.Martin is portraying a world based loosely upon Wars of the Roses era England, and that war in the period was horrific: people died horrible deaths and were literally cut to pieces by swords and other pointy objects or bludgeoned to death by blunt objects;  people were tortured; people were and raped.  I get it.  Martin was actually forced to come out and defend scenes of rape in a previous episode in this season.  His defence was that it would be dishonest to back away from that side of war.

Hmm.

I don't like watching films in 3-D.  The reason that I give is that I don't believe it adds enough to the viewing experience.  I read books and I'm perfectly capable of using my imagination.  I don't need to see objects appearing to come out of a cinema screen to believe that I'm watching a 3-D world and not a projection on a flat screen.  I feel much the same way about the massive use of CGI in films.  Just because you can make it look like an entire city has been laid waste doesn't necessarily mean that you should always lay waste to a city.  Sometimes less is more.

This week's Game of Thrones did not depart massively from the book, and the most upsetting scene in particular is pretty clearly laid out there too over a couple of sentences.  It's horrible in the book too.... but somehow it's so much worse seeing the whole thing laid out lovingly and lingeringly in high definition.  I'm positive they could have achieved exactly the same shocking effect without such a gratuitous display of blood and gore.

This is a good show, and I'm going to tune in again next week, obviously.... but so graphic was the violence that I have at least asked myself the question as to why I'm still watching and you can't help but wonder what kind of impact exposure to these kind of images may have on some people.  It can't be healthy, can it?  What does it say about us that this is how we like to be entertained? The Romans liked seeing people being butchered in the arena, and it's widely agreed that this was a symptom of a sick, brutalised society.  The magic of television means that no one actually died to bring me this episode of Game of Thrones, but although I might be entertained, I'm hardly edified by the experience.

As the song said way back in 1992:

Because a child watches 1500 murders before he's
twelve years old and we wonder why we've created
a Jason generation that learns to laugh
rather than to abhor the horror

Television... breeding ignorance and feeding radiation for the best part of a century.

Are you not entertained?

he's not what you'd call a glamorous man....

In spite of the glorious weather, I spent a good part of the bank holiday weekend shut up indoors watching the TV coverage of the final of the Snooker World Championships from the Crucible theatre in Sheffield.  Well, who needs a suntan when you can watch a sport as gripping as this?  At its finest, snooker bares the souls of its competitors like almost no other sport.  One of the players is always forced to remain in his seat, disconsolately sipping on a glass of mineral water as he watches his opponent notch up another massive break.  There's nowhere to hide and not a damn thing they can do to influence the result.  In those circumstances, the eyes truly are the window onto a tortured soul.  It's almost cruel to watch as their hopes slip away slowly, ball by ball, frame by frame.

At one point, the TV cameras went out into the crowd picking out famous faces: oh, there's Stephen Fry.  He's a huge fan of the game of course.  There's Phil Taylor.  He knows all about the pressure of appearing in a world final.  And so on.  Eventually, the camera came to rest on a pair of guys, sitting side by side and with the most remarkable, unbelievable haircuts perched improbably upon the tops of their heads.  They looked like they had come from another planet.

"Ah", said Willie Thorne, "There's Serge from the band Kasabian and Noel Fielding sitting next to him."  As if that wasn't quite enough information, popular culture guru Thorne (aged 59) then felt the need to add, "Kasabian are one of the biggest rock groups in the country at the moment and Noel Fielding is a very funny man indeed."

Erm.  Thanks for that Willie.

The camera lingered for a while, and I just marvelled at how incongruous they looked sat with the rest of the crowd assembled for the snooker.  I've been to the Crucible to watch the snooker a couple of times, albeit never for a final, and my lasting impression was that the whole place smelt vaguely of fags and stale bacon grease and had the clientele to match.  These two looked about as out of place as a pair of splendid birds of paradise sat amongst a flock of dowdy town pigeons.  They also, by the way, looked completely ridiculous.

I was reminded of the time - a few years ago now - that I was pushing a trolley around Sainsburys and I bumped into a bunch of guys who all clearly thought they were in Motley Crue in the Los Angeles of about 1988: you know, long hair, aviator sunglasses, ripped jeans, studded leather jackets and massive cowboy boots.  Big hair.  I can't emphasise the hair enough.  they had really, really big hair.  One of them was in the trolley and they were waving around bottles of vodka and cases of beer as they browsed up and down the aisles.

This was in Sainsburys.  In the middle of the afternoon.  In a retail park just outside Nottingham.  It was astonishing; a truly remarkable sight.  If Serge from Kasabian and Noel Fielding looked out of place in the Crucible theatre, then these guys looked suitably bizarre amongst the normal suburban, middle-class shoppers of your average Sainsburys.  Asda this is not.  They too looked like they had come from another planet - certainly from another era -  and I found myself wondering what they did for a living in the real world.  Serge is an actual rock star and Fielding likes to imagine that he is the comedy equivalent, but I suppose that at least both of them have day jobs that give them the permission to look quite that ridiculous.  What about this lot though?  Perhaps they all worked in a call centre and did their normal shopping after work during the week?  Maybe they only went the full powder-perm rock look at the weekend?  Maybe they were in a Motley Crue tribute band playing Nottingham that weekend.  Who can say?  I certainly didn't fancy stopping to ask them.  They were a touch rowdy.

Perhaps I should ask Willie Thorne?  I'm sure he'd know.

criticise....

One of the criticisms levelled against bloggers by professional writers is that it gives every idiot a platform to air their ill-considered views. That’s undeniably true, but I fail to see why that’s a bad thing. The subtext of that view, of course, is that reviewing should be left to the professionals, who know what they’re doing. Well, whilst there might be a lot of absolute garbage amateur criticism written online, there are some real gems in there too. It should also be said that there’s an awful lot of rubbish written professionally too.

I’ve been “reviewing” things on here, books, gigs or films or whatever, since the very beginning. As this is my blog though, I’m under no obligation to do anything other than entertain myself: I don’t have a word-count; I don’t have to inform or criticise or do anything that I don’t want to do. I try not to be unfairly critical, but I’m hardly the BBC and I’m not answerable to anyone but myself. I have my own standards, but if I want to have a whine about how much I hate Matthew MacFadyen (a hard-line position that I have reluctantly been obliged to soften recently: his irritating voiceovers not quite negating my surprise at how much I enjoyed his performance as Darcy in Pride & Prejudice) then that’s up to me.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been the top link on the BBC website for “Being Human” for "blog buzz" (whatever that is). Remarkably, I’m still there, even though I was writing about the first episode in the new series and we’re now on episode 4… seriously people, hasn’t anyone else got anything to say? Over 1000 people have clicked that link through to read my mildly critical review of the start of the series. It wasn’t a TV review though: all I was doing was remarking how a programme I had once enjoyed very much seemed to have jumped the shark. As all those people came through – presumably fans of the programme – and read my post, I felt a little self-conscious. I stand by what I wrote, but nonetheless felt the judging eyes of the fanboys on my writing (although, in fact those who were kind enough to leave a comment were actually very supportive). I wasn’t setting out to put the knife into a programme that they loved, but I was very aware that everything I was reading about it elsewhere seemed to be uniform in its praise and it just seemed unrealistic to me. It’s a difficult balance to strike though, isn’t it? It’s easy to stick the knife in and it’s pretty easy to uncritically lavish praise… but the truth almost always lies somewhere in-between.

Over the last few months, I’ve been writing the odd music review for Leftlion (some of them are available here). It’s nothing too arduous: just the occasional 250 word review of stuff by local bands, but I’ve found it to be a very stimulating exercise (even when the house style is to “be nice” – if you don’t like something, then don’t review it). As well as the fact that I’m now writing to a word count, I’m almost always listening to something that I have never heard before by a band I know nothing about. Usually when you listen to a piece of music, your reaction to it is at least partially shaped by preconceived ideas that you have picked up, either through past listening experience or through something you might have read in the press or heard from a friend. When I listened to “Mylo Xyloto” for the first time, for example, I knew very well who Coldplay were and how their music has developed since “Yellow”, and I also had an idea of how the album had been received… with the stuff I’ve been reviewing for Leftlion, I’m basically on my own.

Well, not quite.

Facebook, MySpace and Twitter all usually offer clues, and a simple Google often reveals some kind of insight, whether that’s an album review, a gig review or maybe even an interview. Helpful though that is in offering a bit of context, when it comes to the music, I like to try and make up my own mind. It’s funny how even 250 words can feel like an ocean of space when you can’t think of how to get started…even if, usually, once I have got going, it’s almost never enough. (Look at this post as an example of how concise I usually am in my writing. If I ever do write a book, don’t expect it to be a short one.)

When the review list comes up, I usually just ask the music editor to assign me whatever he really wants someone to cover, although guitars by preference. This has worked out pretty well, and I’ve got a large range of different types of local bands: singer-songwriters, metal, punks, sunny 60s sunshine pop… and some properly good folk guitar work (that I actually knocked back: it was clearly brilliant, but I just didn’t have the frame of reference to do it justice).]

I’ve not really had any feedback on the reviews that I have done (and I keep meaning to collect them together and stick them up here somewhere so I’ve got them to hand), but it’s been a very rewarding experience just to put my headphones on and listen without (m)any preconceptions.

already dead....

Is it just me, or is it suddenly all about zombies?

For the last year or so, you've been unable to move for vampires; whether they're the type that sparkle in the sunlight and agonise about sex before marriage, or whether they are the sort that will hump anything that moves whilst chugging back bottles of a branded blood substitute. Sure, there might have been the odd hunky werewolf hanging around the place from time to time, but when it came to the undead, basically vampires were IT.

Except now they're not.

Suddenly, you can't seem to move for zombies. Yeah, so they're not as cool and mysterious, they're not as well dressed - preferring rags to designer duds - and they tend to lurch around aimlessly with a look of confused sadness and a skin tone that is less pale and interesting and more green and decomposing.... you wouldn't exactly describe them as sexy, would you?  Not exactly something that you'd file in the "Dark Desires" section of Waterstones, are they?

....but zombies are suddenly everywhere you look. Zombies are pretty much as back to basics as the undead get: you don't hear much about zombie family politics, do you? Nope. Zombies wander around looking for flesh to eat. That's it. It's not big and it's not clever, but there you have it. Zombies are HOT HOT HOT.

Maybe I only think this because I've been watching the Walking Dead, the HBO serial starring Egg off of This Life, and every commercial break seems to bring another advert for a new zombie-based computer game, so zombies are somewhat on my mind. I was thinking that perhaps TV and movie executives have seen the success of all things vampire and have been looking for the next big (undead) thing. But maybe zombies aren't back in fashion at all. Perhaps they've never been away. They're not really terribly complex creatures, and I thought everyone knew about zombies, but my wife has been displaying some alarming gaps in her education as we've sat watching the telly. "Do zombies only eat living flesh?" She asked as our hero rode into a deserted Atlanta on horseback towards the end of the first episode.

Um, yes. It's what they do.

"They're not going to eat that horse though, are they?"

Um.... it's either him or the hero of a major new HBO series in its very first episode, which would certainly have been a bold move.

"Oh no! Not the horse!" she cries as our hero crawls underneath a nearby tank and leaves his erstwhile trusty steed to have his guts pulled out and passed around by the feeding zombie swarm....

I think she's getting the hang of it now, although I still reckon she needs to do a bit more homework.

A new series of True Blood starts in the UK in January, and judging from the trailers, they're introducing Werewolves to the cast..... C. is very excited, of course, but how passe is that? Vampires AND Werewolves? Yawn.

Zombies. I'm telling you. It's zombies you want (although I doubt that even Eric would go there. Jason Stackhouse? You know, I actually think he would.......).

infinite dreams....

OK. That's it. I can't bite my lip any longer. I have to speak out.

You know that advert with the monkeys attempting to make coffee? It's got Bill Nighy doing what is apparently his first ever commercial voiceover. He shouldn't have bothered: I hate it.

Why get upset about an advert, I hear you cry. Why waste your energy? Well, for one thing, it's already been criticised by animal welfare organisations:

The advert uses 16 individuals from five species from around the world and shows them climbing over the machines and breaking crockery in a brightly-lit studio. Five animal welfare organisations have come together to formally oppose the ad, and suggest that the use of nonhuman primate “actors” could even be in contravention of the law, dependent on views on the correct interpretation of Section 9 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006

Said Rachel Hevesi of Wild Futures:

“With the release of this new advert, we feel the need to reiterate our long-held concerns on the use of wild animals in entertainment. Whilst they are used in this way their welfare is severely compromised, and it has a knock-on effect to the trade in the primates as pets in this country.

We are appealing to COSTA to pull the advert and reconsider its stance on the use of wild animals in future campaigns. What sits particularly uncomfortably with us is that COSTA is one of the coffee companies whose products are endorsed by Rainforest Alliance. To carry this well-respected accreditation and then to exploit rainforest animals in the sale of its products is an issue that we have raised with Rainforest Alliance directly. We are awaiting a formal response”.

If it's true that they've been mistreating animals, then obviously that's bad. It is not, however, what upsets me. It's the tone:

Cut to a load of monkeys climbing over coffee machines:

"It is said, that if you give a room full of monkeys a typewriter each, then, in time, they will write the entire works of Shakespeare....so if we gave the monkeys coffee machines instead, would they come up with the perfect cup of coffee?"

Cue scenes of monkeys smashing up the coffee machines and generally making a mess.

"No.  Because great coffee isn't born of luck, it takes time and training to be an expert barista.  Not all coffees are created equal"....blah, blah, blah.

Right. First of all, it's not a room of monkeys given time, it's a single monkey given INFINITE time.

The infinite monkey theorem states that "a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare".

That infinity is important: the theorem illustrates the perils of reasoning about infinity by imagining a vast but finite number, and vice versa. The probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time of the order of the age of the universe is minuscule, but not zero. Having a roomful of monkeys at keyboards rather than just one does not improve your chances over an infinite amount of time, even if it makes for a better visual for your commercial, as the infinity renders the actual number meaningless.

Secondly - and more importantly - what part of the theorem do you not understand if you think that our monkeys could not, over the course of time, come up with the perfect cup of coffee? That somehow the perfect cup of coffee isn't down to luck.  Is it easier or harder to write the entire works of Shakespeare by chance than it is to make a cup of coffee, would you say? (even if you aren't providing the monkeys with Nespresso machines....) Actually, over infinity the chances of both happening are exactly the same, but both will definitely happen... although I'm betting that the perfect (now there's a subjective measure. Who decides what that constitutes? What qualifies them to decide?) cup of coffee is made before the complete works of Shakespeare are replicated. Can you imagine being the monkey who types the complete works perfectly bar one typo on the last page? "The Edn". D'oh! Close but no cigar, my friend. How about a consolatory cup of coffee?

So the advert is stupid and it annoys me. It's trying to be clever and I think it misses the mark. How do you think Costa staff feel about an advert that is essentially saying "drink coffee here, our staff are better at making it than monkeys". That's not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it? For starters, it invites an easy gag.... if you pay peanuts.... etc. Have you even ever had a better than mediocre cup of coffee in a Costas anyway?

Gah!

Inevitably, someone has actually tried to replicate the infinite monkey theorem using real monkeys (but presumably not infinity). Their conclusion?

"Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it."

Given that we usually don't have an infinite amount of time to wait, let's hope that our baristas are at least a little more sophisticated than that in their attempts to make our coffee.

...And don't even get me started on the Curry's advert currently on the air featuring R2D2 and C3PO.  Why George?  Why?

when the weather vane points to gloomy....

Last week, I heard the terrible news that Rob McElwee is no longer going to be presenting the weather forecast on the BBC.  It's all part of some cuts that are seeing McElwee, Phillip Avery (another favourite of mine for his almost 1940s approach to weather bulletins on the radio) and Tomasz Schafernaker move to back office roles at the Met Office.

Apparently, after 90 years of working in partnership with the Met Office, the BBC recently decided to put the contract for the weather out to tender.  The Met Office won it, but are now clearly having to make cuts in order to make any money out of the deal.  Presenters earn more money if they appear on air, and so three high profile presenters are making way.

Old school weather forecasters like Bill Giles are wondering if this is a further sign that the BBC are continuing their inexorable move away from presenting the weather seriously: using proper meteorological experts to write and deliver the forecasts and replacing them with nicer looking, younger and - crucially - cheaper presenters.

As former head of the team of weathermen at the BBC, Giles is clearly worried about this dumbing down.  He is, however, no fan of McElwee:

"While many people seem to like Rob’s quirky style, I think he is well past his best. I find his delivery irritating and condescending.  If he was to stay on air, he would certainly need training to stop him lowering his voice and petering out at the end of sentences"

Well, with respect Bill, that's a rather pompous way of looking at it.  I like Rob McElwee and I'll miss him terribly when he's gone.  He's been a familiar face on the telly since 1991, and in a world of autocue robots, his idiosyncratic presentation style is a breath of fresh air (with a chance of showers later on in the eastern counties).  This isn't just some monkey in front of a camera and an autocue, this is a guy with a sense of humour and a nice, wry delivery.  We have crappy weather in this country; it's not really much of anything.... never really wet, never really dry; rarely really hot and rarely really cold.  It changes a lot.  So we talk about it ALL THE TIME.  We can't rely on it being hot in summer or cold in winter, so localised weather forecasts are pretty important to us, and the people who deliver them to us become familiar figures:

As Joe Moran, a reader in cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University says in the Guardian:.

"I think the BBC forecasters become cult figures because they aren't trying to be personalities, and they are employed for their expertise.  It was the ordinariness of them – people like Fish and McCaskill were an antidote to celebrity culture. I also think the fact that the forecasts are unscripted is important – the personality of a forecaster, like Rob McElwee, comes through in a way that you just don't get with the glassy stare at the Autocue. It becomes more of a conversation with the viewer. I think McElwee's forecasts are little  masterpieces of concision and wry wit and complicity with the viewer."

It was bad enough that they changed the weather map to that awful scrolling around thing, but getting rid of McElwee?  In an anodyne, homogenized, autotuned world, this is truly awful news.  Apart from anything else, how can you not love someone who describes his hobby as finding enough time to have a hobby....apparently so far he has failed.  Sadly it looks like that situation might be about to change.

Be careful what you wish for, eh Rob?

Last winter was the coldest for 31 years with an average UK-wide temperature of just 1.5C (35F), down on the long-term average of 3.7C (39F).  As we slip towards November and the bleak prospect of Britain being gripped by another harsh winter comparable with those of 1939-42, surely we need all the expert forecasters and comforting asides in our forecasts that we can get?

ironic....

It appears that there is a campaign underway to try to stop the X-Factor winner having a Number One single at Christmas.  I've got absolutely nothing against X-Factor.   I don't watch it myself, but I don't really care that other people do.  It's just entertainment, isn't it?  For myself, I find it mildly distasteful that someone like Simon Cowell is able to use primetime television as a beauty parade designed entirely to make him money: he owns the acts; he makes money from the phone calls made by the public to vote; he makes money from the guest artists who appear each week to promote their albums released on the record company Cowell makes money from; he even makes money when the songs chosen for the acts to perform on the show inevitably find their way back into the charts the following week.  Why do you think Cowell decided to put Jedward's eviction to the public vote when he had the chance to evict them - this was an act, remember, that he'd repeatedly said was hopeless and bad for the programme?  He put it to the vote not because he felt the people should decide, but because the phone revenues are divided between ITV, Cowell's company, and Cowell himself.   Putting it to the vote made him a pile of cash.  Why would anyone expect him to do otherwise?  Does anyone really think it's a competition rather than a pure entertainment/money-making machine?  You or I might not like it, but people don't have to pick up the phone and ring in to vote, do they?  Nor do they have to go and buy the records if they don't want to.  Cowell ruthlessly promotes his artists and carefully presents them to us so that we will make him piles of money, but we still have a choice.  Lots of people happily give up their money because they feel they have been entertained.  Who can argue with that?  What qualifies us to say that the music we like is inherently better or somehow more deserving?

I don't really like the fact that the output of the show -- to my ears, anyway -- sounds suspiciously like it's aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator; designed to appeal to as many, and to offend as few, people as possible.  Leona Lewis is a decent singer, I'm sure, as is Alexandra Burke, but do you think it's an accident that they sing like the big American divas, all quavers and tremors and high notes?  No, it's because that's what sells.  It's safe.  If that's what people like, then I suppose there's nothing wrong with that.  It's not to my tastes, but live and let live, I suppose. 

....but it seems that someone really, really wants to piss on Cowell's chips this year by getting something else to Number One.  Sort of funny, I suppose.  I was all for Jeff Buckley or Leonard Cohen's versions of "Hallelujah" giving Alexandra Burke's cover a run for its money last year... not especially because I dislike Burke or really wanted to try and stick one to Cowell... more because I thought they are both much better versions of the song.  I suppose a part of me was a bit put out that a song I loved was being used like this, but actually I thought it was good that more people were discovering it and making Leonard Cohen a bit of much-needed cash.  Mind you, I imagine Cowell was smirking all the way to the bank again anyway, as his company owned the song itself... and so he was making money out of every version of the song in the charts, no doubt more than Cohen himself made (and he was reported to have made £1m from it).  I'm sure that taught Cowell a lesson he won't soon forget, eh?  Not.

This year's campaign was started on Facebook by Tracy and Jon Morter:

"Fed up of Simon Cowell's latest karaoke act being Christmas No 1? Me too ... So who's up for a mass-purchase of the track 'KILLING IN THE NAME' from December 13th (DON'T BUY IT YET!) as a protest to the X Factor monotony?"

WTF?  Check out the record they've chosen..... "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine?  Now, I don't know what song the X-Factor winner is going to sing, but I do know that I think that this is one of the finest, most powerful songs ever recorded and I am absolutely delighted that I keep hearing it on the radio.  It's a corking song.  Cowell owns none of it, apparently.

I already have a copy of this song, so I doubt I'll be downloading it on the say-so of someone on Facebook just so I can stick my fingers up at X-Factor....I was mildly amused by the story and pleased to hear the song again, but then Simon Cowell said something this afternoon that made me shake my head in disbelief:

"If there's a campaign, and I think the campaign's aimed directly at me, it's stupid. Me having a No 1 record at Christmas is not going to change my life particularly.  I think it's quite a cynical campaign geared at me that is actually going to spoil the party for these three [the X-Factor finalists]."

What?  Simon Cowell is saying that this is cynical?  

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

That, my friends, is about the funniest thing I've heard this week.



You tell'em Zack.

Brilliant band.  I hope you download the song because it's brilliant and not just because you're trying to make a point.

over the moor, take me to the moor....

As you might imagine, having a job that entails going to an office means that, even if I had the inclination, I wouldn't have much opportunity to watch daytime TV. I don't exactly rush in the morning, but I'm almost always at my desk by a little after 9am with my first americano of the day. Today was different: I had an appointment for a checkup at the dentists at ten past nine, and wasn't actually seen until after half past. This meant that I had ample opportunity to sit in the waiting room and to watch the end of GMTV (Lorraine Kelly talking to someone about a green tea diet) and to catch the beginning of the Jeremy Kyle.

I'm aware of Jeremy Kyle, and I know that he hosts one of those shows that is a pale shadow of the Jerry Springer show and the kind of programme that tries to stir up controversy and gets its kicks by raking over the ashes of other people's lives in the name of entertainment. I only watched about ten minutes, but it was still more than I could stomach. The theme of the show was based around a young couple. The girl was a couple of months pregant and was convinced that her partner was no good and was sleeping with other people behind her back. The boyfriend in turn wanted to take a lie detector test to prove that he wasn't lying. So far, so tawdry. It turned out that the stress of it all had driven the girl to drink, and she was downing two litres of cider. That was all the information that Kyle needed to pause the show, climb up onto the highest of moral high-horses, and to lecture the girl that she had NO RIGHT to be drinking when she was pregnant. THAT WAS FACT. She had TO STOP. It wasn't so much what he was saying, as the tone of vast supposed superiority he used to deliver it, to sycophantic applause from the audience. Once that was out of the way, we could meet the suitably pasty and incoherent boyfriend and hear his side of the story. Kyle wound him up, of course. He assumed a sort of crouching position in front of the couple on the stage, and fired in provocative question after provocative question. Eventually, the guy onstage started to shout, and he stood up and moved towards Kyle. Kyle stayed crouched and still exuded superiority as security came onto the stage. I was called up to the dentist before I saw the results of the lie detector test, but before I left I heard the boyfriend confess, before being strapped into the machine, that he had been unfaithful once... but he stressed it was a one off, as if that made things any better.

My teeth are fine, but my faith in humanity has taken something of a knock. I couldn't decide which was worse: Kyle's reptillian hunt for entertainment from someone else's tragedies, or the fact that this couple seemed to genuinely think that the answers to their problems could be found in a daytime TV studio.

My mood wasn't improved by the news either: a three month old baby and his two year old brother were found stabbed to death in their home in Manchester, with the crime having apparently been committed by their own mother. This story comes hard on the heels of the horrible story of "Baby P", the 17 month old child who was found dead in his blood spattered cot in August last year. Three people will be sentenced next month after two men were convicted on Tuesday of "causing or allowing the death of a child or vulnerable person". During the course of his short life, "Baby P" was horribly abused. The post mortem revealed eight broken ribs and a broken back, with another area of bleeding around the spine at neck level. There were numerous bruises, cuts and abrasions, including a deep tear to his left ear lobe, which had been pulled away from his head. There were severe lacerations to the top of his head, including a large gouge which could have been caused by a dog bite. He had blackened finger and toenails, with several nails missing. The middle finger of his right hand was without a nail and its tip was also missing, as if it had been sliced off. He had a tear to the strip of skin between the middle of the upper lip and the gum, which had partially healed. One of his front teeth had also been knocked out and was found in his colon. He had swallowed it. Horrible. It's almost beyond comprehension. Worst of all is the revelation that the child and his parents were visited 60 times over eight months by social workers, police and health professionals. Sixty times.

In October, at exactly the same time that the nation was working itself up into a froth about Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross and really important issues like that, a man was convicted of murdering his malnourished 16 month old daughter by placing her over his knee and snapping her spine in two following months of painful abuse. The prosecution at the trial noted how the child's injuries indicated she must have been in extreme pain for weeks prior to death, and the policeman in charge of the investigation was quoted as saying that "the catalogue of horrific injuries have been some of the worst I have seen in 30 years of policing". The mother of the child, and this is the bit that's really stayed with me, was given a suspended sentence after admitting to child cruelty, but was said to be in the bottom 1% of intelligence levels for this country.

We live in a world that can sometimes seem unbearably brutal. Do we really need "entertainment" like that provided by Jeremy Kyle and his ilk? Or perhaps you'd prefer to watch a celebrity having a breakdown in public, like Kerry Katona the other week on This Morning? Well, "I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" is back on soon, so perhaps we'll get to see someone falling apart at the seams on that. Perhaps it will be one of Kyle's predecessors, Robert Kilroy-Silk.

We disdain the Ancient Romans for the brutality of their chosen entertainment. From our lofty perch of irreproachable moral superiority, we wonder how they could have been considered civilised when they got their kicks from feeding people to wild animals and to watching men hack each other to pieces in the arena.

Are we really so different? We're screaming for blood every bit as loudly as those audiences in the Flavian Amphitheatre, and our society is every bit as morally corrupted as theirs.

he was born scentless and senseless....

I love watching The Apprentice.

I think we're supposed to see it as reality TV, where some of the brightest young business brains in the country go toe-to-toe for a prestigious job working with Sir Alan Sugar. It's "the job interview from hell", apparently.

Well, clearly it's not that. For starters, I think it's stretching the truth beyond breaking point to call this bunch of arrogant, puffed up salesmen the cream of young British business talent (or if they are, then we really are screwed). Claiming, as they all seem to do, that you're going to throw yourself into every task "one thousand percent" in an effort to get a job with SIRALAN (as everyone must call him) is just silly, and everyone who actually does have a brain can see that quite clearly. Besides, would "the best salesman in Europe", as one of them keeps referring to herself, really going to take a "six-figure salary" working in the arse-end of London knocking out crappy telephones, or whatever it is SIRALAN now does since he flogged off his sky box business? Wouldn't you expect to be earning a shitheap more than that already?

No, it's just entertainment. The way I look at it, these clowns have volunteered to make monkeys out of themselves over and over again for several weeks purely for my enjoyment on a Wednesday evening.

They have me screaming at the TV every week. They're all self-important, over-confident and utterly without any kind of substance. They spout every kind of business jargon that they have ever heard, and yet they are revealed time and time again to be braggarts and empty vessels. It's brilliant. Actually, it's better than brilliant, I actually believe that this programme is therapeutic. There's something incredibly soothing about watching a TV programme that is basically a version of my own office environment taken to its most ludicrous extreme.... except that in this world, the biggest muppet of the week gets fired and has to take their little wheelie bag out of the "boardroom" and into a waiting taxi. If only real life were more like that.

No one ever really gets fired anymore do they? In my experience, the most incompetent people are usually promoted somewhere they'll be someone else's problem. To paraphrase Jarvis, they say that the cream cannot help but rise to the top, but I say....shit floats.

Dance monkeys! Dance!

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* Excellent minute-by-minute coverage of the show, often by Anna, available here

** Excellent after-the-event analysis here