Radio

I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , ,

The frightening pointlessness of rolling news channels was amply demonstrated once more last night, with BBC Radio 5 Barely Alive’s coverage of the Norwegian vileness.

First, the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner decided to opine – apparently in the absence of too much evidence – that the events bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack.

“Seems a little surprising,” I thought. “A blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian speaker apparently acting alone doesn’t seem too much like the multi-handed al-Qaeda atrocities we used as an excuse to bomb Arabic-speaking little brown people back to the Dark Ages.

“But, hey. This is the BBC. They wouldn’t just – you know – make it up as they go along, would they?”

This morning I awoke to the news that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian speaker is apparently a Christian fundamentalist with a history of decrying Islamism and multiculturalism.

Yet this morning’s Today programme was curiously bereft of Mr. Gardner fessing up to the fact he’d been talking shit 10 hours earlier.

Worse still, the BBC’s rolling news radio network inexplicably thought that the appropriate way to cover the tragedy was to phone up and ask for a comment from Jan Åge Fjørtoft.

Mr. Fjørtoft is an intelligent and erudite Norwegian who speaks fluent English, but I still don’t see what expertise he can bring to the analysis of these events in his capacity as a former professional footballer for Swindon Town, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Barnsley.

Maybe he was the only Norwegian in the duty producer’s contacts book…

Ironically, Mr. Fjørtoft was bumped mid-sentence by the stereotypically hyperventilating presenter precisely because the producers had managed to find someone to talk to who actually had some involvement in the day’s awful events.

If these rolling news networks can’t actually cover breaking stories with a semblance of competence, then what exactly IS their point?

But then perhaps I’m missing the wider point. Maybe the only appropriate reaction to acts as senseless as those in Oslo and Utoeya is utter senselessness.

Vaz deference

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I’ve just heard The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz on the radio talking about honour, integrity and people correctly resigning to take responsibility for their actions.

Once more, for clarity: that’s THE DISGRACED FORMER EUROPE MINISTER KEITH VAZ opining on honour, integrity, and taking responsibility.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Oh, fuck me.

(With thanks to Pickled Politics for the title.)

Flaccidity

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I thought Iain Duncan-Smith would be the worst Leader of the Opposition I ever experienced.  Wholly lacking in personality, gravitas, communication skills or the indefinable leadership ‘X factor’, his only redeeming feature was that he was a fully paid up member of the Toryscum and his maladroit tenure was therefore amusing to me.

Edward Samuel Miliband has, however, romped clear in the race to be the least competent and most clueless holder of the office.  The distance Miliband – a man so inept I can’t even be bothered to think of a soubriquet for him – has put between himself and the likes of Duncan-Smith, Howard and Foot resembles nothing so much as the way Shergar drew clear of the field in the 1981 Derby.

Miliband’s campaign for the leadership was pathetic insofar as he sought to claim that the calamaties of the Bliar and Arrivederci Years were nothing to do with him.  That untrue, self-serving claim ensured he did not get my vote.

Interestingly, of course, he didn’t win the vote of MPs and MEPs.

He didn’t win the vote of party members, either.

While I am in favour of both trades unions and proportional representation, you do have to wonder whether everything is entirely rosy in the garden when a candidate who lost two of the three electoral colleges on offer still wins the election.

I’ve given him as much time and cut him as much slack as I could.  But while I largely decry the knee-jerk reactionism so beloved of rolling news channels, there is also a point at which you have to accept that things are not working out and that persevering with the status quo will do more damage in the longer-term than the short-term damage of changing leaders for a second time in twelve months.

The way politicians sound and look matters.  It shouldn’t matter – and certainly not as much as what they say and do – but it does.  And Miliband sounds and looks dreadful.  For wont of a better description, he looks and sounds floppy.  While having the charisma of a breeze block didn’t stop John Major, at least he was not handicapped by also being ill-at-ease with himself and others.

So, awkward and floppy.  It’s not much of a selling point, is it?

And the electorate can’t help but draw an unfavourable conclusion in comparison with the presidential swagger and unrelenting smoooooothness offered by PBD. (LL Cool D, anyone?)

That Bloody Woman and Bliar were lucky Prime Ministers in that they faced (largely) awful Leaders of the Opposition at most of the elections they fought.  If we hope to have a welfare state, a state education system and an NHS to leave to our children, we can’t repeat that mistake.  We have to put up a vertebrate against them.

The final straw for me came with Miliband’s abysmal decision to call for Kenneth Clarke’s resignation last month.  Clarke fucked up during one radio call-in, fair enough, but anybody who has actually paid any attention to British politics over the past 30 years knows that Clarke is one of the last Toryscum standing on whom social democrats should not automatically urinate.

Miliband’s judgement was abysmal on the day of Clarke’s problems, but I might have been able to overlook it had he not compounded the problem 48 hours later by publishing a pitiful attempt at self-justification in The Independent (effectively the only ‘quality’ newspaper left to the Minister until Harry Potter is finally sacked for bankrupting The Guardian).

He could have just moved on and hoped that everyone would forget.  But he didn’t.  In a lovely little microcosm encapsulating his entire time in office, his judgement was awful and his performance worse.  He stood limply at the despatch box savaging Clarke like a dead squirrel and then awkwardly spewed anaemic, nonsensical drivel in the direction of news microphones and newspaper column typesetters.  It was only marginally less infuriating than it was embarrassing.

(I’m not going to waste everyone’s time by repeating again the various arguments about why Clarke should have rightly been called for his poor use of language in espousing a perfectly sensible penal policy proposal and then left to get on with it.  I will, however, observe that Miliband’s limp posturing almost certainly resulted in that policy being spiked.  So well done, Ed.  Fucking brilliant work.)

For the record, I voted for Ed Balls in the Labour leadership ballot.  I don’t care whether or not he’s a nice guy: he is undoubtedly the best performing senior Labour politician against the Eton Trifles.  He gets under their skin; he gets at them; he gets to the point; he gets that point across.  The contrast with Edward Samuel Miliband could scarcely be starker.

Anyway, enough whining about nonentities.  Typography For Lawyers has just landed on my desk.  And I may have just wet myself a little bit.

Consider this the hint of the century

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Everything I was going to post this afternoon has already been posted here.  Go there.  Read it.  Click the links.  You won’t be disappointed.  It’s very good.

I know that there are some who’d prefer things like egg-chucking at Griffin not to happen, and I can see that point of view. I just happen to think that seeing his fat smelly face looking frightened and upset is a wondrous thing. For sure, the way to defeat the fascists is to engage the working class into politics they can believe in, to work hard on real solutions to poverty and unemployment, and to fight at every turn to denounce the lies spouted by prejudiced idiots about immigration and multiculturalism. Yes yes, I know that. But making that vile fascist tit look stupid is a good thing. Satire is egg-chucking without the actual egg, and we need that too. We need all kinds of attacks on Griffin, making him look ridiculous in every sense, exposing his nastiness and making him into the national joke he is.

Carry On Nurse

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The Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, Nadine “Mad Nad” Dorries – who may have up to four residences, including one in South Africa; and in those circumstances it’s entirely plausible that one might forget which is one’s main home, particularly when one also can’t decide from election to election what one’s surname is or whether or not one is pro-choice – went over the top yesterday with her theory that Expensesgate is being orchestrated as a plot by the Barclay brothers, the Telegraph‘s proprietors, to destabilise politics in the run up to the European elections in favour of UKIP and – ahem – the BNP.

She repeated this belief on her blog and – incredibly – on BBC Radio Five Live.

The relevant extract from her blog (thanks to Google’s cache):

The Telegraph are uncovering a few cases of fraud, but not enough, so they are more than slightly embellishing some of the stories. I write as a case in point.

Enter the Barclay brothers, the billionaire owners of The Daily Telegraph.

Rumour is that they are fiercely Euro sceptic and do not feel that either of the main parties are Euro sceptic enough. They have set upon a deliberate course to destabilise Parliament, with the hope that the winners will be UKIP and BNP.

A quick online check of the Barclay brothers and their antics on the Island of Sark is enough to give this part of the rumour credence.

Another rumour is that the disc was never acquired and sold by an amateur, but it was in fact a long term undercover operation run by the Telegraph for some considerable time, carefully planned and executed; and that the stories of the naive disc nabber ringing the news desk in an attempt to sell the stolen information are entirely the work of gossip and fiction.

These rumours do have some credibility given that this has all erupted during the European Election Campaign and turn out is expected to be high with protest votes, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, or should I say the Barclay brothers.

Now, if this is all a power game executed by the BBs, how would they do that?

It is a fact that these men are no fools and are in fact self-made billionaires.

I would imagine and believe that if any of this is true, they know the British psyche well enough to whip up a mood of public anger, hence the long running revelations in the DT.

Where do I get this from? Well, at heart I am just a cheeky scouser. I like to go into the rooms of the faceless and nameless in Parliament, sit on their desk and ask pertinent questions like: who are you? What do you do? I’ve made friends with one or two. One in particular I am very fond of. He is a mine of very astute information; and whilst in his office yesterday, we chunnered over the ‘what is this all about?’ question.

He reckons this is all a power game. That the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want.

His very poignant words to me were “if any of this conjecture is true, Parliament will become full of racists, fantasists, and has-been celebrities. We will be rendered impotent and may never again regain the authority to withstand the pressure, opinion and whims of the overtly wealthy.”

Scary stuff!

Scary stuff, indeed, you deluded banshee/harpy/drama queen/freak.

Overnight Ms. Dorries’ blog mysteriously disappeared from the t’Internet.

This morning it is reported that the Barclay boys’ lawyers took exception to their clients being labelled – wholly unjustly, of course – as being no better than common-or-garden coup orchestrators (like Mark Thatcher, for example) and had Ms. Dorries’ ISP take down her blog.

A week ago Mad Nad was little more than an irritant to people with more than half-an-inch of brain.

Now she’s an unbalanced delusionist, who’s been caught being highly economical with the actualité where her expenses and living arrangements are concerned, and is a liability to Posh Boy Dave’s project by pissing off the owners of the Tory’s in-house newspaper.

It’s all rather amusing – particularly when you consider that the only reason she’s in Parliament is because she was parachuted into the Mid Bedfordshire constituency by Conservative Central Office just before the 2005 General Election because the Tory incumbent, Jonathan Sayeed, had been deselected for, er, financial misdeeds.

Meanwhile, even the Tristans and Farquhars in deepest, darkest Berkshire are giving their own particularly unpalatable Tory a good, public spanking:

(If only we could find someone to do the same to Hazy Fantazy Blears, too.)

Tory sleaze is back and they haven’t even taken office yet.

I love it.

Fascinating creatures

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The indefatiguable Richard Madeley is “sitting in” for Sarah Kennedy this week on Radio 2.

It’s comedy gold – compulsive listening.

This morning:

Never, ever, EVER Google yourself.

This is Bananarama.

Fucking genius: the man’s channelling Alan Partridge!

No Irish (except Wogan), No Blacks, No Dogs

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Unbelievable.

{Programme Name:}   Sarah Kennedy
{Transmission Date:}  19 – 11 – 08

{Comments:}
At around 7.10am on 19 November, Sarah Kennedy wondered how, given that ‘so many Muslims are called Mohammed’, teachers could differentiate between them in class.  Mohammed is indeed a fairly common Muslim name, but Sarah is a fairly common English name – indeed, I was once in a class with two Sarahs.  My teacher then differentiated between them by calling them ‘Sarah A’ and ‘Sarah M’, cunningly using the first letter of their surnames.  Why would or should this be any different with Muslims or children called Mohammed?  Does Ms. Kennedy consider Muslims to be special cases in some way?  I consider Ms. Kennedy’s singling out of Muslims in this manner to be – at best – passively racist.

Ms. Kennedy has form in this area and regularly comes out with ‘ambiguous’ statements that are open to misinterpretation: indeed, just a few moments before this comment Ms. Kennedy needlessly announced a record by Tanita Tikaram (born in Germany, grew up in Basingstoke) in the sort of mock Indian accent that I thought had died with Peter Sellars.

Given the new puritanism currently sweeping the BBC (and Radio 2 in particular) please can the BBC explain why this sort of output is considered appropriate?

Regards,

[The Minister]

From:  reception@bbc.co.uk
To:    [The Minister] Date:  Sat, 27 Dec 2008 5:54 PM

Dear [Minister]

Thanks for your e-mail regarding the ‘Sarah Kennedy’ programme.

Firstly, I should apologise for the delay in getting back to you. We realise that our correspondents appreciate a quick response and I’m therefore sorry that you’ve had to wait on this occasion.

I understand that you were offended by comments made by Sarah during the programme concerning children with the name Mohammed. I note that your concerns lie with her comments as to how teachers would differentiate between the many children with this name and that you feel that Muslim children were being singled out in this instance.

The editor responsible for this show passes on the programme’s apologies for any offence caused. He has also spoken to Sarah about this.

I can assure you that your complaint has been registered on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us with your feedback.

Regards

[name removed to protect the innocent] BBC Complaints
____________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

No, no, no: listen to ME

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Each December the man who is julesallen puts together a Cultural Review Of The Year, with contributions from friends, acquaintances and hangers-on.  The Director’s Cut of this year’s Ministerial contribution is reproduced below for your delight and amusement.

Written Word

I put together a fine share purchase agreement this summer: does that count?

Stage

I failed to set foot inside a theatre all year.  The theatrical world did not complain.

Cinema/DVD

I don’t think it was a great year for Cinema overall – The Dark Knight, Mamma Mia and Quantum Of Solace all made me pray for death to come – but I enjoyed quite a few DVDs.

The year started well, with me catching up with the brilliant Tell No One and The Lives Of Others on DVD.  Juno deserved its success and I thought Ellen Page’s performance was terrific.  No Country For Old Men was just excellent in every respect.

I really enjoyed 2 Days In Paris and Paris, Je T’aime.  I liked Vantage Point until the final 20 minutes.  Venus made me laugh a lot, as did Stranger Than Fiction and Priceless.  Rendition was a well made movie, notwithstanding the presence of Meryl Streep.  I surprised myself by liking Catch And Release: chick-flick producers take note – cast Kevin Smith in a romcom and even I’ll watch it.

My favourite movie of this year, though, was Lars And The Real Girl.  I only finally saw it on DVD in October but I loved every frame (even, surprisingly, those frames in which Emily Mortimer featured).  Ryan Gosling is one of the five most interesting actors working today and, while I’m automatically well disposed towards any movie that emphasises the importance of society and socialism, this was just a smashing story, well told.

Website

I’ve really enjoyed the writing on Popdose throughout its first year, a collective effort from a network of lovers of popular culture.  Lifehacker continues to feed my inner geek.  One of the many music blogs I visit, The B Side, introduced me to many new pieces of great music and the incredible life story of ‘Sir’ Lattimore Brown.

Above all, though, three websites made the US general election for me: Politico and FiveThirtyEight.com were invaluable resources, while Things Younger Than Republican Presidential Candidate (Oh, And Did I Forget To Mention War Hero?) John McCain was a daily treat that occasionally had me weeping with laughter.

Televisual Entertainment

I’ve all but given up on TV.  If I had my way the Ministerial Residence would no longer have a television: now I’ve finally learnt how to use proxy servers and torrents it’s just a big, irrelevant box in the lounge that used to insult my intelligence.

For lack of anything better to watch over dinner I sat through and quite enjoyed Reaper (E4) and Chuck (Virgin 1) but neither pulled up any trees.

30 Rock was and is immense, though why it’s taken Five so long to show the second series is beyond me.  Fortunately, copyright-bending technology means I’m already onto the third…

The only other thing I’ve gone out of my way to watch is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (More4).  161 editions in 2008 and about 120 of them were laugh-out-loud funny, which is a mighty strike rate.  I suspect Stewart is even more gutted than me that the show is on hiatus when someone threw shoes at Dubya…  It’ll be interesting to see if the producers can keep up the standard when their fella moves into the Oval Office.

I feel I should like Gavin & Stacey, as lots of people I respect rate it very highly.  However, every time I see a clip it leaves me cold.

Sport

For the first time ever I don’t have a single football memory from the year: the game has eaten itself and barely interests me anymore.  Padraig Harrington retaining The Open was great viewing; for a few hours on one Sunday in July, I became a tennis fan – the Wimbledon final was astonishing; it was lovely to see Paula Radcliffe win the New York Marathon, particularly after her insane insistence on completing the Beijing race despite being unable to walk had me in tears at 3am one Sunday; and the last lap of the season’s last Formula 1 grand prix was like something out of Boy’s Own.  (That said, I’m delighted the nonentity of a man that is Lewis Hamilton was beaten to the BBC Sports Personality award by Chris Hoy, who not only deserves it for his brilliant achievements but also seems actually to have a personality.)

Otherwise it’s the Olympics.  Lots of great moments – Michael Phelps, Christine Ohuruogu, Rebecca Adlington (you can take the girl out of Mansfield, but…), the rowers, the sailors, the breathtaking performance of our cyclists (I’ve become a big fan of Victoria Pendleton) – but the stand out was the performances of Usain Bolt.  Sometimes your brain can’t quite comprehend what your eyes are seeing and I had to re-watch his performance in the 100 metres final a few times before I believed it.  Thank God he appears to be clean.

Music

Best Album
Raphael Saadiq – The Way I See It
Mark Ronson has inexplicably built a career and reputation out of slapping some half-hearted horns on a karaoke backing track and claiming that this lends it a Sixties/Seventies Motown/Philly vibe.  Raphael Saadiq (Charlie Wiggins to his friends) shows the preening prinny how it’s done and has produced some blissful tracks that at times stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the output of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Gamble-Huff.  As the beatspermil.com review says:

The Way I See It is a good record to give to your dad, it’s a good record for making love, and it’s a good record for your wedding reception. And it won’t make you want to blow your brains out after you hear it at your fifth high school dance. Because this isn’t just a retro throwback – Raphael Saadiq has out-mastered the masters. Play it for your girlfriend – you’ll get laid.

Very Good Albums
The Killers – Day & Age: shouldn’t work but it does
The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age Of The Understatement: at times sublimely good
Snow Patrol – A Hundred Million Suns: strictly by the numbers but no less listenable for that
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Raising Sand: I hope this is a one-off because I’m not comfortable liking anything with which Plant is involved

Good Half-Albums By Those Who Could Have Done Better
Bon Iver – for Emma, forever ago
Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
Ray LaMontagne – Gossip In The Grain
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Cardinology
Adele – 19
Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
Kings Of Leon – Only By The Night
Kaiser Chiefs – Off With Their Heads

Partial Returns To Form By Those I’d Long Since Written Off
R.E.M. – Accelerate
The Verve – Forth
Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul

Those Whose Back Catalogues I Have Explored In Depth For The First Time And Greatly Liked
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Chic

A year on and I still can’t decide about Duffy.

I’m going to shoehorn radio into this category.  I love radio but have despaired over the paucity of British commercial radio for years.  While BBC Radio 2 has diversified and widened its scope and – in so doing – become the most popular radio station in the country, commercial radio has responded by constantly narrowing its computer-generated playlists in an attempt to elminate any risk of alienating its core audience without ever attempting to attract new listeners.

Radio 2 plays 750-800 different tracks each week, whereas in the week to 27 September, Capital Radio played just 234 different tracks and repeated them an average of 9.7 times.

When Virgin Radio re-branded as Absolute Radio it bucked this trend.  In its final week as Virgin, it played 500 unique tracks and repeated them an average of 3.5 times.  In its first week as Absolute, it played 732 unique tracks with an average repetition of 2.4; in its second week it played more than 900 unique tracks with an average repetition of 2.  Whether this approach will work remains to be seen, but the station has become much more listenable at least for the time being.  I’m enjoying it while I can.  (Absolute also employs Iain Lee, whose Sunday night phone-in is the funniest thing on the wireless.)

Cultural Highlight

Undoubtedly, the US Presidential election result.  Enough has been written on that subject by far better writers than me (indeed, more than enough has been written previously by me): suffice to say I had a smile on my face on 5 November, 6 November, 7 November, 8 November…

I’ve quite liked how a fun-sounding little “credit crunch” has turned into the most profound failure of free market capitalism in history.  Still, never mind, eh?  We all make mistakes with other people’s money.

In the same vein, it was nice to see a few Chancers getting their comeuppance, even if another dozen filled each gap they left.  For example, Richard Branson’s increasingly tarnished marque was rejected by the people who bought his Megastores and the people who bought the radio station – meaning that he lost two massively lucrative trade mark licence fees in the space of nine months: that should make for interesting reading in the group accounts.  Oh, wait a minute: he doesn’t publish his group accounts, does he…?

Gideon Osborne was exposed by one of his Bullingdon chums as the Chancer he is after his Club Med freebie; the Barclay brothers got the caning they deserved by the serfs of Sark and promptly showed just how much they respect democracy; the twonk who co-founded the Carphone Warehouse eventually learnt that public companies are not private playthings, while that nice Conrad Black chappie is nine short months into a 78-month prison term for failing to learn that lesson himself.

And Jim Beresford and Douglas Smith, partners in the Doncaster-based Beresfords Solicitors, were struck off for ripping off hundreds of invalided ex-miners and their families to the tune of tens of millions of quid.  Shame.  My heart will bleed even more for them when those funds are traced and find their way back to their rightful owners.

Let’s hope 2009 holds a similar fate in store for Satan Cowell.

A late contender for cultural highlight came from Muntadar al-Zeidi who managed to hold Dubya to greater account with a pair of size nines than any of the American legislature, the American judiciary, the American people, the United Nations or the International Court in The Hague.  A marvellous piece of old-fashioned political protest.  I loved the fact that CNN reported it with the explanation: “In Arab culture, throwing shoes at someone… is considered an insult,” as though doing so in Pig’s Knuckle, Arkansas is a sign of affection.

Cultural Nadir

Manuelgate.  Seriously: WTF?

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