Tag Archives: BBC

When Your Parents Read The Daily Mail

Posted on by

The Daily Mail and its alternately salacious and harrumphing Sunday counterpart The Mail on Sunday are Orwell’s five minutes’ hate morphed and expanded into tabloid form.

They are to the brain what a mallet is, em, also to the brain – a big, sturdy mallet painted red, white and blue, with each side of its face carrying conservative slogans, ranging from ‘We should bally well help our own first’ to ‘Help our own? They should bally well help themselves, you know, like I had to, by God!’.

The people who read The Mail have been bashed with this hammer so many times they don’t even realise they’re concussed any more, nor that they’re in danger of their brains leaking out from their ears to be smushed underfoot by their own wingtips or fluffy tartan slippers. It’s a comfort to them, that hammer. If it ever stopped thudding they might have to think for themselves, or possibly even be forced to give a shit about someone out-with the green and pleasant lands of their own, nostalgia-flooded recollections.

I’m possibly judging readers of The Mail too harshly, especially since my own parents count among that much-maligned readership. My parents’ reason for buying the paper in the first place doesn’t appear to have been ideological, though long exposure to its contents inevitably has certainly helped to shape their ideology. Whether The Mail planted right-wing sentiments in the egalitarian gardens of their minds or merely provided the necessary nutrients to allow certain long-buried seeds to grow is a matter of conjecture. I do know that when I was a teenager ‘The Independent’ was the family newspaper. Then it was The Times. And now it’s The Mail. A sort of steady slide from left to right. What comes next? A subscription to Breitbart? A signed photo of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins?

Their reason for becoming Mail readers was simply this: price. They don’t like things like The Sun or The Star, and beyond those tub-thumping, shit-and-tit-covered dish-rags, it’s the cheapest newspaper option out there. Beautiful, right? Bargain bigotry.

Each time I visit them I never pass up the opportunity to offer withering comments on their choice of ‘news’ – remembering always to pronounce those inverted commas around the word ‘news’. My mum tends to get angry when I chastise her, claiming that her choice of newspaper in no way informs her outlook on life, even though for many years now her mouth has been filled only with false teeth and Daily Mail headlines.

On my last visit I gave her a guided tour of the edition she had sitting on her kitchen counter-top.

Page three was taken up by a full-page splash about Ewan McGregor’s divorce, complete with corny Star Wars headline. So far, so Express. Next up, the Royal Family. Whereas The Express is still hung up on the ghost of Princess Diana, the Mail is pursuing an endless, obsessive vendetta against Meghan and Harry.

Now, I’m no fan of The Royal Family – I’m  something of a republican in that regard – but the vitriol handed out to those two turns one’s stomach. Mail readers are a curious breed. Many of them like to get the bunting out, and buy cups and saucers emblazoned with the visage of old Lizzy Lizard. Most of them probably own a tonne-weight of commemorative coins encapsulating such epoch-defining moments as Prince Phillip scratching his arse with a gilded shoe-horn or the Queen staring witheringly at a foreign dignitary.

These people clearly harbour a desire to go back in time, not to the knees-up-Mother-Brown, Blitz-tinged days of the 40s and 50s, but way, way back – five or six hundred years back – to experience the sheer joy of living as serfs under the boot of some tyrannical, maid-murdering, family-fucking monarch of the true dynastic golden age. ‘Be a priv’lige to have you shit in my worfless dead mouff, m’am.’

Elsewhere in the ‘newspaper’ there was an attack on Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, misrepresenting an interview she gave to the New York Times about the differences between how the Scottish and UK governments have handled the coronavirus outbreak, which they topped off with the disingenuous and inaccurate headline: SNP AIDE BLAMES ENGLISH FOR RISE IN CASES’.

Never one to miss a chance to stick it to Labour, there was a piece on Jack Straw’s son blacking up. And another one with a headline straight out of The Daily Mash: DID CORBYN’S MARXIST HENCHMAN GIVE BORIS AND CUMMINGS VIRUS? Good question. Once you’ve answered that, let’s find out if Jeremy Corbyn intercepted the Roswell aliens, stole the recipe for AIDS from them, and then used it to sink the Titanic.

I knew this next headline would be divisive, given that my mother and I have polar opposite positions on both the SNP and Independence: ‘£30M BILL FOR SWINNEY’S U-TURN ON EXAMS FIASCO’. I could almost hear my mother’s face tightening into a scowl as I read it aloud.

This was the story of the Scottish Government apologising for allowing geography and socio-economics to have a more impactful influence on post-COVID student grades than the measured predictions of their teachers. Not ideal, though can you imagine The Mail’s headlines in some alternate universe where the Scottish government hadn’t at least made a token effort to compensate for the teaching profession’s very human impulse to be nice to their kids during these troubling times: ‘EVERYONE’S A WINNER in SNP SCOTLAND: CLASS OF 2020 CERTIFICATES NOT WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON.’

However, in the face of evidence and dissent the government was big enough to concede that its methods, reasonings and results had been flawed. They then issued a full and frank apology, and then promised to make the appeal process quick and pain-free. And literally free. Which they did.

I guess if you were being uncharitable you could characterise that as a U-Turn, but genuine political U-Turns usually come with less apologies (usually nearer zero) and a million per cent more obfuscation. So, again: disingenuous framing.

Mum, however, wouldn’t accept any defence of John Swinney or the SNP . ‘I’ve always hated Alex Salmond,’ she said. I just shook my head and kept flicking the pages.

The most unforgivable piece in that day’s hell-rag was probably the one carrying this head-line: ‘SO WHY IS BBC HANDING YOUR LICENCE FEE TO THIS SLEAZY PEDDLER OF PORNOGRAPHY?’

BBC The Social commissions online videos from contributors on a wide range of themes and topics, ranging from humour and health, to inspirational stories and educational vignettes. The fee for having a video accepted and featured isn’t huge.

One of these occasional contributors, Mandy Rose Jones, whose content is predominantly focused on mental health and body image, also sells pictures and videos of herself through an adult on-line portal called AdmireMe.

Both this site and the lady herself are unaffiliated with the BBC. Nevertheless, the poor girl was horse-whipped across two pages, as The Mail held her up as some sort of pervasive sexual deviant out to warp the nation’s kids. The article was nothing less than ritual humiliation, the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake. A spurious, offensive diatribe. What this woman chooses to do online – as long as it’s legal – has no bearing whatsoever on the videos she produces for BBC The Social. And for all that it matters, which it doesn’t at all, no-one would’ve known about Mandy’s presence on AdmireMe had the Mail not chosen to turn her into collateral damage in their ongoing ideological war against the BBC.

The Mail is a hateful, gossip-filled tabloid that lends the illusion of a broadsheet. To make stupid people feel clever; and important. If this newspaper were a person it would be a dead donkey with the face of Katie Hopkins. It’s disingenuous, dirty, despicable, deceitful and disgusting. And I wish my parents wouldn’t buy it.

‘Come on, son,’ my mum said to me, with a proud and wounded look on her face. ‘What am I supposed to do? Buy The Daily Record?’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just closed the newspaper and walked away.

From bold to old: What your radio station says about you

Posted on by

I sometimes listen to Radio 4 and think, ‘How did I get here?’ Did I graduate through Radios 1 – 3, work my way up through the channels? And where do I go next? Is this the end of the radio road for me?

If at first glance there appears to be an incremental, chrono-evolutionary progression through the BBC’s public service channels, then Radio 5 kind of fucks that up.

Ah, the well-known ages of man: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle-age, old age and, erm… sport. Never-the-less, there’s a path of sorts to be followed between the first four BBC stations; a loose road-map that traces a route from the fast roads of youth, winding up through the mountains of middle-age, and finally down into the valley of death.

Radio 1, with its achingly hip beats and love of ‘banging’ tracks (or whatever youth lingo they’re using these days that’s clearly being transmitted on too high a frequency for my ancient ears to detect), is your first stop: the radio-wave that signals you’re coming-of-age. Radio 1 bombards you with every trendy musical sub-genre, from Peruvian Seal Techno, to Robert Redford’s Reverse Reggae, to Andalusian Anne-Frank Funk. The station’s shows are presented by 13-year-old DJs with floppy, flicky hair, fake tans and regional accents so dense and packed they form linguistic black-holes from which no sense or consequence can ever escape.

From there you move on to Radio 2, where the tunes are still edgy – but only if you’re 47. You listen to phone-ins about how annoying it is to listen to phone-ins about phone-ins, and you’re so annoyed you decide to phone-in, but then you have to hang up because the station has almost breached its contractual obligation to play a Manfred Mann song every seven minutes; the producers placate you by offering to have you on the next morning when their phone-in topic is ‘Men Making a Stand When They’re Banned by Manfred Mann: Mann’s Inhumanity to Man’.

Next stop, Radio 3, the station for those who still like music, but can’t be bothered with lyrics any more – the sort of people who own a Charles & Camilla commemorative fountain pen they bought after seeing an advert on the back cover of the Radio Times; the sort of people who then use that fountain pen to keep a hand-written journal of their crushingly dull lives, preserving their trip to the supermarket for posterity in an ornate hand as they listen to a piece of classical music that once appeared in the film Gladiator, which might be Mozart or something, but they aren’t really sure, because they don’t really like classical music, but they sure as shit like people KNOWING that they listen to classical music.

Finally, it’s time to say ‘Fuck the music’ altogether and embrace Radio 4. No music for you anymore, sonny Jim, unless it’s the theme tune from The Archers, or 30 seconds of a song chosen by some Hungarian nuclear physicist you’ve never heard of on Desert Island Discs. From hereon out you’ll be listening to interviews with reverends about the history of raffles of Pre-Raphaelite drafts in the Raffles hotel by Russian riff-raff, or Simon Callow reading the shipping forecast, or afternoon plays about laconic, lah-dee-dah English detectives investigating the theft of bejeweled ostrich eggs in 19th century Chile; and, of course, twelve-part documentaries about the man who invented crepe paper.

OK, let’s address the thoroughly middle-aged elephant in the room here. I’ve always liked Radio 4. In fact, as a young man, in full mockery of the supposed linear progression through the BBC channels I outlined at the beginning of this piece of writing, I jumped straight to Radio 4, hopping over the horror of Radio 1 in one single, grateful bound. I’ve long, and indeed always, considered Radio 1 to be ‘noise’, even when I was in its consumer demographic. All of the songs they’ve ever played sound to me like somebody taking a home-made aerosol flame-thrower to a noisily loading ZX Spectrum as a man shouts ‘WRECK IT, FOOL, CHECK IT’ over and over into a megaphone. I think a little part of me has always been 44; it just took me a long time to notice because I spent most of my teens and 20s either drunk or stoned (or both).

Radio 4 just seems to fit me. It’s comfortable: like a fluffy slipper o’er the toes; an antique pipe between the teeth (I’ve never smoked a pipe, but I like the idea of it), or a lazy fondle of your sudsy, soap-slicked cock in a warm morning shower.

But sometimes… just sometimes, Radio 4 and I have a little ideological disagreement or class-based skirmish. Something happens to remind me that I’m not some middle-aged, middle-class, Home Counties cabbage-grower from Berkshire, but the son of a woman from Maryhill who spent her formative years shiteing outside; a man who took all of the trappings of his parents’ rags-to-nicer-rags, working-to-middle-class success story, soaked them in vodka, rolled them in Rizla and set them alight.

Here’s a case-study for you.

Now, I’ll always listen to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour if it’s on when I’m driving. It’s entertaining, and makes me feel like a proper feminist who cares about the issues and that. Sometimes its features are gentle, sometimes whimsical, sometimes worthy, often serious. And sometimes, just sometimes, they can whiten the hair and curdle the blood, so agonisingly brutal and terrifying are the topics they tackle.

Last week I was listening to it as the latter scenario unfolded. It was all I could do not to smash myself into a truck and be granted death’s instant mercy, such was the almost incomprehensible unspeakableness of it all. A guest had been invited on to the show to discuss the kind of harrowing, life-or-death, high-stakes suburban hell hitherto only contended with by the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Something dark. Something you dread. Something you hope and pray will never happen to you. Yes, I think you know what I’m talking about here.

That’s right…

The nightmare of poor cumin management.

Take a second to imagine the horror. You open the kitchen cupboard one day to find not one, not two, not three, but SEVEN tubs of cumin. SEVEN? Lord Jesus, how could I have been so careless? you ask yourself. What have I become? WHO IS THIS MONSTER I SEE REFLECTED IN THIS GLASS (FREE-TRADE OF COURSE) JAR OF ETHICALLY-SOURCED BASMATI RICE? SEVEN tubs of cumin? What next? TWELVE carafes of ALMOND MILK? I THINK I SHOULD JUST FUCKING KILL MYSELF NOW BEFORE I INVADE AUSTRIA!

The guest was a drawling, well-to-do woman called Deborah Robertson, who was on to promote her new book about de-cluttering your home. Isn’t that just ‘tidying up’, I hear you ask? No, you fool. It’s a lot more complex than that. For starters, Deborah’s method is a kinder, gentler, ‘less absolutist’ one, whatever the blustering fuck that means.

Many years ago, you see, Deborah’s house started to become so full of stuff that she didn’t know what to do with it all. Naturally, she read all of the books about it (books about tidying PLURAL?), but she just couldn’t get it (or she just couldn’t afford a cleaner, more than likely – but that’ll be the first thing she gets if the book sells well).

During Deborah’s short segment I learned about ‘Swedish death-cleaning’ (sounds like one of Radio 1’s musical sub-genres), the 10 De-cluttering Commandments, the hell of surplus cumin (sorry to keep opening that wound), and the necessity of always taking things you don’t need anymore to the charity shop. What a whirlwind; what a whistle-stop education in what you must agree is a vital life-science.

“What am I going to do? I’ve got too much stuff? The Africans who walk fifty miles to a well each morning to get the water they need to survive don’t know they’re born, they really don’t.”

“I’ll tell you what steps you can take to help remove the clutter of unnecessary items from your house: buy my wholly unnecessary bloody book, that’s what you can do. I’ll even throw in my new one: ‘Why it’s Always a Good Idea to Wipe Your Arse After a Shit’.”

I’m sure the book will be on every member of the ‘ladies who lunch’ and the chattering classes’ Christmas lists this year, and thereafter available in charity shops the country over come January the 2nd.

You depressed me, Woman’s Hour, so much so that I switched channels in disgust, and found myself listening to Radio 1 for longer than a second. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chizzle, went the music. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chiz…CLICK went my finger.

Fzzt.

I drove the rest of the way home in silence.

What frequency is Radio 5 on?

PS: ‘incremental, chrono-evolutionary‘ – I’ve no idea if this weird hybrid word I invented earlier in the article is apt, or if it even makes any kind of sense at all, but by Christ it sounds impressive, right? And that’s the main thing.

New TV Shows This Autumn 2014

Posted on by

bbc

25 Years to Life on Mars

In 2013, BBC producer Sam Tyler is the victim of a vicious didgeridoo attack, and wakes up on the ground outside the BBC studios in 1973, with Jonathan King’s cock in his mouth. Walking into the BBC Studios is like walking into a different world. Is camel-coat wearing, cigar-puffing Director General Geney Savile all he seems? And if his new guv’s on the level, then why does he keep patting his arse, winking at him and calling him a nonce? And why does Savile have a yew tree potted up in his office? The only man Sam feels he can trust is Bruce Forsyth… but for how long?

savileIs Sam insane, back in time, or in a coma? Is he even a BBC producer? Every time Sam passes a TV set he sees an image of his younger self lying unconscious on a hospital gurney, with Cliff Richard singing songs at his bedside. Allegedly.

Features a cracking soundtrack by Gary Glitter.

Brew Peter

An informative lifestyle magazine show for young adults on the dole. Ever wondered how to draft that perfect letter to an employer that will guarantee you’ll never get hired? Also, Richard Bacon reveals the secret of how you can use a strip of sticky-back plastic to secure your bags of blow to the underside of hard-to-reach places. Perfect for evading the filth! And discover a brilliant use for all of those empty Kit Kat wrappers you don’t need any more. Each week, viewers send in their crayon-drawn portraits of Margaret Thatcher, which are set on fire by an angry man dressed as a miner.

Crystal Meth Maze

methA group of toothless, stinking tramps in vests run around the many zones of the Crystal Meth Maze – Up the Graveyard, The Underpass, Big Tam’s Hoose, The Swingpark and Down the Docks – taking part in timed challenges to get their hands on those coveted Crystals. Watch with glee as they compete in games like forced prostitution without protection, bare-knuckle fighting with their best friends for the amusement of strangers, stealing from their families, and selling their own internal organs to the Chinese. What a laughriot. With Richard O’Dien.

Red Dwarf X-pectations

Posted on by

Red Dwarf X premieres on Dave tonight at 9pm. In a few short hours we will know if that ‘X’ signifies buried comedy treasure, or if it will make us all think of a solitary dead eye on the corpse of a cartoon character that’s been drawn by a three-year-old.

And, yes, I know it’s Roman numerals for ten, before some clever cunt who genuinely thinks I’m some sort of drooling malcontent tries to point it out.

Lister and the Cat.

Red Dwarf was my favourite comedy as a youngster, and memories of the show are inextricably linked to memories of my childhood, and of growing up. I shared favourite quotes and crap cast impressions with schoolmates (I did an impressively shite Kryten). It’s fair to say that each new episode was ‘event TV’, and fellow geeks and I would spend the day after transmission reliving the entire episode to the point of suicidal tedium.

When the first series was released on VHS in two-parts I scrimped and saved summer holiday money to get my hands on it. £13.99 for three episodes at a time in good old combustible, snappable video format – and no Monster Munch for a month – but it was worth the sacrifice.

From the series 4 glory days.

And what a show: Smeg, Talkie Toaster, two Rimmers, the first Kryten (‘They’re dead.’ ‘But I was only away for a minute.’), Lister having twins, the Better Than Life video game, the fried egg, chilli, cheese and chutney sandwich, the Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society (or CLITORIS for short), Lister eating dogfood and burning books, inflatable Rachel, a self-destruct system that dispenses chocolate bars, Gandhi with a machine-gun, Kryten dating a blob, Lister fighting a curry monster, Kryten having a penis, Rimmer going nuts in a Gingham dress, Mr Flibble, group hallucinations thanks to aggressive marine life, Lister marrying a mutant, Rimmer being able to touch again, the Polymorph, Ace Rimmer, Dwayne Dibbley!

So many classic moments and characters have been etched into my brain. I was so obsessed with the show that I was moved to write this in my diary when I was 16:

“I brought down Red Dwarf with me that I’d videotaped the night before, because Papa likes it. I don’t mind watching it for the second time, as instead of concentrating on the programme, I like to concentrate on the reaction of the person watching it. Let me explain why: if you enjoy a certain thing on the television, it must contain elements you can relate to, therefore each one you enjoy reflects a facet of your personality. Every time my grandfather would laugh at one of the jokes, I would take that as a personal victory. It’s not as simple as merely saying, ‘Oh, he enjoys the show,’ because on some level his laughter is telling me, ‘Oh, he likes me.'”

I think it’s clear from reading that diary excerpt that I was a bit of a wanker. And incredibly creepy. After all the bizarre staring I subjected him to, my grandpa must have thought I was some sort of cross between Droopy and the little dead girls from The Shining. It also appears that my self-esteem was almost entirely based upon other people’s enjoyment of a 1980’s sci-fi comedy show. I must remember to write that one down for my psychiatrist.

Kochanski: Red Dwarf’s very own Yoko Ono.

Still, as much as I loved – and still love – the show, something went wrong: Rob Grant, one of Red Dwarf’s creators and one half of its writing team, quit the show after series six. It became clear that Rob was the writer responsible for the ‘com’ part of the ‘sit-com’ equation, and a noticeable dip in quality was evident following his departure. Series 7 still had some excellent moments – most notably the JFK-themed curry hunt – but the dissolution of Red Dwarf’s writing partnership, along with the decision to forgo a studio audience and film the show more like a comedy-drama, changed the atmosphere and ‘feel’ of Red Dwarf for the worse. Kochanski didn’t help either. She was shit (the character, rather than the actress) (yeah, add that rider to spare her feelings, Jamie, because she’s definitely going to be one of the three people who actually read this shite, you fucking egotist).

Danny John Jules as The Cat.

The Cat in particular became a one-dimensional retard, who seemed to spend his time pulling stroke faces and uttering the odd hackneyed and unfunny line about corduroy trousers. It was the cat’s almost sociopathic selfishness, vanity and callousness that made him funny in the earlier series, not his stupidity, which was never so much emphasised. Things picked up a bit with series 8, although I do agree with one Amazon reviewer who said that the show became like ‘Chuckle Brothers in Space.’ Also, in general, I feel it would have been better if the series had stayed with the six-separate-stories format and left the two-and-three-parters alone. I really liked the episode ‘Cassandra’, though, with the super-computer that could predict the future. It felt like classic ‘Dwarf’ again.

The pant-shittingly bad ‘Back to Earth’.

Then came the three-part special ‘Back to Earth’, broadcast on Dave in 2009, that was so hellishly bad it felt like Doug Naylor had travelled back through time to 1989 to personally spunk in my face. The entire first part – especially the tomato banter between Rimmer and Lister, and the distressingly cringe-worthy scene in which Rimmer conducted away to himself oblivious to the plight of his ship-mates as they battled a giant squid on the monitors behind him – almost made Citizen Khan look like the single greatest comedy ever produced. Fair enough, some of the ideas in ‘Back to Earth’ were inventive, if not a little derivative, but so what? It’s a comedy. It’s supposed to make me laugh, first and foremost.

Anyway, ‘Back to Earth’ was discussed on a comedy forum a few years back, and I found an interesting bit of chat about it from Scottish comedian Stu Who?.

Ok … so here’s a hypotheses … eh?

When we are younger and haven’t watched a vast amount of comedy, sit-coms, etc, we adopt some programmes which grow, with the passing of time, to be our nostalgic, firm favourites.

In their time, they were quite good, but weren’t really the classics of comedy that we think they were.

If the show is revived, we tend to compare it with the rose-tinted view of the previous series, rather than reality.

Or … in other words:

Red Dwarf was a pile of juvenile shite back then … and still is.

Discuss

I hope he’s wrong, and this isn’t just a case of me donning rose-tinted spectacles and staring at my childhood like… well, staring at it like a creepy grandchild who won’t leave his grandpa alone.

Red Dwarf was funny. Red Dwarf IS funny.

I know it’s just a TV show, and if I’d started watching it when I was 40 I probably wouldn’t give this much of a shit. I know I’m displaying a fanaticism and a personal stake in this akin to a religious fundamentalist defending his holy book. But please, please, please let tonight’s episode exceed my expectations, and blot out the years of disappointment I’ve suffered since Rob Grant left. Let the little embers and flickers of past genius that still glowed in the show, in some form or another, in the later series rage into a comedy bush fire. Let me love Red Dwarf again. Let me laugh.

Give me back my fucking childhood, Doug Naylor! And wipe that cum off my forehead.