Why Dont You Blog?

There’s a hallowed Whydontyou tradition that this blog has to get out a quick comment on any new Dr Who series. The first episode was OK, on balance.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Catherine Tate (a UK comedian) and it was a national embarrassment to see Tony Blair mouthing her catchphrases (worse even than his Simpson’s cameo.) Her Dr Who character just seemed like a more sympathetic portrayal of half of her standard comedy characters. All the same, she’s very gifted and wasn’t as irritating as she might have been.

It was telling to realise that I was actually hoping for the return of Billie Piper, although her apperance seems to have just been a two-second teaser. According to the Register, Lily Allen was the top assistant choice in November. I don’t know if that was just a wild Register rumour or if it’s still a possibility. IMHO, the best assistant in the new set of Dr Who series has been Freema Agyeman.

The space ship effects were good. I’m a sucker for well done 3-d graphics and good special effects.

(Except for the hanging bit, which was exactly as silly as almost every other “hanging from the side of a building” scene ever. I mean, just try hanging from anything, even if your life DOESN’T depend on it. If you can manage 15 seconds and you aren’t an experienced mountain climber - total respect. Or try and find a multi-storey building that doesn’t generate its own wind system. )

Cultural refs:

• A merge of the Supernanny and Anne Robinson stereotypes of bossy female Englishwomen. There aren’t many recognizable examples outside the TV world and some newspaper columns, but, hey, that’s the world now anyway.
• The supposedly increasingly fat UK population is a really popular topic, of course. Here the idea was that excess lard turned into a life form, which was an entertaining idea.
• People’s endless desire for any diet pills that will magically trim fat.
• Office work. Office blocks. Those cages that hold the window cleaners who don’t actually have to abseil down the side of your building.
• Alien visitor, crop circles and random conspiracy theories. Need I say more. Obviously, they usually turn out to be true in Dr Who.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Charlie Brooker and some of the cast try to express why the Wire is the “best tv show since the invention of radio,” in the Guardian’s guide section today.

I can’t argue with that.

Brooker is otherwise not quite as feeble as I am at expressing just how and why the Wire is the best thing ever aired although he does his own fair share of gushing like a teenage fan. The Wire actors are pretty good at expressing why the Wire is the best tv show ever.

Argh, July! FX, I would hate you for making me wait till July, except for the fact that running through the preceding series first has shown me so much that I didn’t appreciate the first couple of times. I thought the first few episodes of series 2 were a bit poor - by Wire standards. Seeing it again, I realise that it’s got enough of its own brilliance. And the acting… Omar just blows away whole scenes with a few subtle expressions.

Charlie Brooker says that he’s jealous of people who haven’t seen it yet, because they still have that pleasure to come. Maybe that thought will encourage me to wait till July but, hey, I live in a developed country in the 21st century - deferred gratification was never going to be one of my favourite ideas.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Dear Great Spirit, if you refuse to make me an employee of a major banking institution with a slapdash attitude to its assets, please make me a diet guru.

Someone with a cruel sense of humour prompted me to watch The Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses on the previously-unknown-to-me UK Style.

I’m sorry, I can’t do this sort of thing the justice it deserves. It’s almost off the scale of exploitative nonsense. The programme’s subjects expose their ailments, then (at best) get to drink wheatgrass, defer to wind spirits and throw their negativity away by dropping stones in a brook.

According to the website preview:

Run by leading British nutritionist Amanda Hamilton, the Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses aims to detoxify, rejuvenate and deal with the root cause of these afflictions, rather than simply mask them with quick and easy remedies.

If there are quick and easy remedies, wtf aren’t these people taking them?

Detox. Whenever I hear the detox word in combination with diet, I grind my teeth. These will soon be stubs, if the sort of poo that passes for a lifestyle programme on UK tv is anything to go by.

I used the “poo” word because I also saw another TV diet programme on Thursday, in which the “poo doctor” Gillian McKeith plays a minor role.  No she’s definitely not a doctor - see Ben Goldacre’s BadScience )- nor even a medically qualified nutritionist, but she is well known for scrabbling through people’s shit on national tv.

This show had a 20-odd stone woman and a 6-stone woman teaching each other how to eat. They swap diets for a week and supposedly learn some lessons that will lead both of them to a more normal weight. What! Swap one disordered way of eating for another? This is a good idea?

“Too-thin” girl stuffs herself with fish fingers and snacks and “too-fat” woman lives for most of the day on a slice of lettuce. The thin girl suffers from the impossibility of taking in gargantuan amounts of food and the fat woman is constantly starving. At the end of the week, they’ve lost or gained weight… Well, duh.

Surely this unedifying story can’t teach anything about eating - unless the lesson is “you can lose weight if you stop eating and gain weight if you eat more”, in which case, how stupid are you, if you don’t already suspect that?

These programmes make spectacles out of the subjects, who are either completely naive or so desperate for their 5 minutes that they will happily bare their bodies and reveal their most embarassing problems to the whole nation. It’s not even as if they get rational solutions in return. They just become adverts for the peddlers of new age woo.

Which brings me to my This-Week’s-Favourite-Silly-Diet. I’ve heard of this froma few people recently. I even know of someone who spent £130 on a blood group diet profile. It’s based on your blood group. A review in Weight loss resources website describes the diet and its scientific basis quite succintly:

Follow a diet that’s designed specifically for your blood group and you’ll lose weight, feel healthier and lower your risk of many diseases. At least, that’s what Dr Peter D’Adamo, naturopath and creator of the Blood Type Diet claims in his book Eat Right For Your Blood Type. No wonder then, that it’s been a hit with Hollywood stars like Liz Hurley and Courtney Cox-Arquette, as well as closer-to-home celebrities, like Martine McCutcheon……
But while Martine might be a fan of the Blood Type Diet, most medical and nutrition experts aren’t…….
Medical experts universally agree that the theory is nonsense, and say there is absolutely no link between our blood group and the diet we eat.

Well celebs are so well known for their grasp of scientific nutrition, aren’t they? Speaking, personally, I wouldn’t dream of taking health advice from anyone who didn’t have at least a minor part in a UK soap. Or was at leastgoing out with a Premiere League footballer.

In a medical emergency, when no soap stars are available, I would accept the assistance of a tv “nutritionist.” But they would have to have their own line of high-cost novelty foods, as a bare minimum, and I would naturally prefer a televised record of dissecting human secretions.

Popularity: 19% [?]

BBC’s Sunday morning religious broadcasting programme The Big Questions today discussed whether blasphemy law should be repealed and whether fundamentalist religious indoctrination of children was child abuse.

On the panel are Ann Widdecombe MP; Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury; Professor Richard Dawkins, the scientist and atheist; and Jonathan Bartley, the Director of Ekklesia, the religious think-tank. The special guest is the actor and singer, John Barrowman.

Members of the public apply for the rest of the slots. I doubt that the competition is intense. :-)There’s a number to call and a form on the BBC page, if you ever want to attend one of these.

Lord Carey supported Dawkins’ argument that blasphemy law should be repealed.

Dawkins pointed out that no one says “This is a post-modernist child ” although they will identify a Catholic child or a Baptist child. Naturally, the Archbishop disagreed on faith schools equalling indoctrination. He said baptism identified a person’s adherence to Christianity, rather than to any sect (which is surely missing the point) He even got slightly panicked, as he sought to distinguish UK religious schools from the behaviour shown in a film clip about US Faith camps, without saying anything to offend any fundamentalists in the lunatic wing of the Anglican church.

Generally, there was interesting and well-argued debate. Dawkins (wearing a fetching red A lapel badge) made excellent points throughout and was treated with respect by the celeb and non-celeb panel members and the presenter.

Astonishingly, a psychologist (who defined herself as culturally Jewish but religiously atheist) reported that a section of her degree students actually insisted that dinosaurs walked with humans and so on. She pointed out that, despite being in the final year of a science degree course, they had no understanding of science. Everyone - Christians, Muslims and atheists alike - expressed horror at the currency of anti-evolution beliefs. In fact, creationism was pretty well identified as child-abuse by at least one speaker.

The only reliably nutty person in the panel was former Conservative politician Anne Widdecombe, (wearing a less fetching cross on a necklace chain and a fish brooch.) She gets dragged into almost any televised discussion of religion, being so bizarrely un-mainstream as to be compelling.

I wasn’t taking notes - I didn’t know this would be on the test…. Someone might Youtube it.

Popularity: 12% [?]

It gives me no pleasure to report that Channel 4 are investigating the qualifications of its TV nanny, according to Guardian.. Well, OK. I lied. Yes it does. It gives me huge pleasure.

This woman has been on television giving horrific instructions to parents about leaving babies to cry and limiting cuddle time to ten minutes a day. And so on. Fashions change drastically in how to relate to your children. The 1930s “Truby King” style neglect is the most pernicious parenting fashion ever.

New parents are scared and open to any outside influences that claim to have the answer to their difficulties. TV experts that seem to have a simple answer are an obvious resource for people who may not have friends or family who can help. Sadly, these answers are s^ite. It is dog-training for humans.

So. Wahay. It’s great to see yet another spurious telly “expert” on life have the basis of their expertise challenged. (Cf Gillian McKeith, et al.) Let’s see the TV nanny sent to her room, please.

Popularity: 12% [?]

This is a link to a really good, if disturbing, video. It discusses parallels between extreme Islam (in the shape of a Muslim man with a Hitler moustache) and Christian fundamentalism and how this has given our rulers a pretext to build up our fears to achieve their ends.

h/t to paul canning whose blog reminded me about the video Charlie Brooker showed to da yout’ this week, and even provided a link.

Charlie Brooker’s sample of young people found it infinitely more interesting than the youth tv dross he also showed them.

Oddly, given that Charlie Brooker is a tv critic so brilliant that he can make you chortle out loud, (hence giving away the fact you are secretly reading his Guardian column in work) his own tv ventures are not usually crowned with glory. But, even so, it takes a superhuman effort of will to disagree with his conclusions on any programme. And, he’s right on this one.

Popularity: 40% [?]

This blog does its fair share of whining about daft things on the BBC, especially its website (”constructive criticism.”) There are disturbing current plans to cut back on everything good about the BBC, with a loss of 2,500 jobs. According to last week’s Guardian, the BBC’s high-profile serious journalists, such as Paxman, have been told not to express their criticisms of this sort of stuff on air.

The director-general has been quoted voicing the sort of Dilbert-speak that bodes ill for any organisation, from the perspective of both staff and customers. For example:

….his plan would deliver “a smaller, but fitter, BBC” in the digital age.
The six-year scheme, called Delivering Creative Future…..

Over the past few years, the BBC has expanded from being a public-service broadcaster - worthy enough in itself, to providing an almost unequalled Internet news resource. In the face of a general dumbing-down of television to a level that the average pet tortoise would find intelligible, the BBC still provides some tv and radio of amazing quality .

Well, it seems this all has to stop. The new plan is for more repeats, cuts to the television news, fewer current affairs programmes, fewer non-commercial kids’ programmes, ads on international stuff..

The editors’ blogs sound like it’s all an exciting new opportunity. Well, wouldn’t you, if you might be facing redundancy and criticism wouldn’t keep you out of that media dole queue?

…standing still is not an option because our audiences are changing and we must change with them….

Changing? More than normal changes then? In what ways? Granted most people have cable or satellite. I admit to watching minimal terrestrial tv, but that’s not because it’s over my head. It’s because most of it is hopelessly poor:

• Soaps that should be poured down the plughole.
• Reality shows that would make you want to Columbine the whole human race, if they actually bore any relationship to “reality”
• Home / clothes / lifestyle makeovers, all aimed at a general transformation of the UK into a giant open-plan Stepford.
• Programmes about raising children that make B.F. Skinner look laissez-faire
• Plastic surgery programmes that actually promote it
• Programmes about celebs and their weight problems
• 100 greatest/worst adverts for car wax, or similar. With slightly recognisable talking heads discussing the choices
• “Programmes” with a chirpy talking head and a screen puzzle designed to keep the drunk or mentally ill phoning in to “answer” trick questions at £300 a nanosecond

Basically, tv that would make the choice between watching it and gnawing off your own arm quite a difficult decision.

Is it the changing audience that’s driving this? If the audience is changing to be made up of the bedbound with broken remote controls, then maybe.

The BBC, although not blameless, is the least offender in this crap. It still represents so much of what is worthwhile in British culture. Cuts in its budget, cuts in its real staff….

Argh. That was the crunch of tooth on right arm flesh.

Popularity: 32% [?]

On the BBC Tech pages a blog by Kate Russell recommends a site called Gnu Trade where you can gamble on the world’s stock markets.

Now everyone will have their own take on whether gambling on market movements is a good or bad thing but even if you do not want to risk a penny it is possible to make money here.

That is because the site allows people who bet with cash to back players who are playing for fun. If you attract a real money player to back you and you make a profit - then some of that real cash gets sent to your account.

If you are sh*t hot (belatedly decided to think of family-friendly filters) at online poker you could probably make a lot of money, There are plenty of maths geniuses out there. It’s got to be easier than the lottery,

I can think of a few other potential unforeseen consequences, whether “good” or “bad”.

My grasp of economics is pretty shaky (as witnessed by my lifetime failure to even try to be rich) but I thought the things traded in stock markets related to people’s livelihoods. Food? Manufactured goods? Oil?

Stocks and shares aren’t just numbers. Entire national economies and people’s lives rest on them.

Aren’t international markets supposed to be “sensitive” to the slightest event? Share prices fluctuate within moments with the impact of a mysterious set of forces - from changes of government to the wildest rumours.

Wild rumours on the Internet? Surely not. Bizarre misunderstandings across cultural and language gaps? No, they can’t happen on the Net. The Internet isn’t allowed to lie. It’s like television (It said so in the Simpsons.)

Might not the international markets become ever more volatile? Easier to manipulate? Might not the implications be ever more destabilising?

It’s been so long now that economists have been saying that “free trade” is the answer to everything. Maybe we will soon find out if this is the case. Alternatively, you could think of it as a scientific test of chaos theory.

Popularity: 20% [?]

On the BBC editors’ blog, Craig Oliver discussed Al Gore’s Nobel prize, in the context of the BBC’s decision to lead Wednesday’s night’s news with a judge’s ruling that there were 9 errors of fact in “An inconvenient truth.”

Oliver says the Nobel prize is “controversial” as the award raises the question “What does climate change have to do with world peace?”

Well Craig, there’s this little thing called an ecosystem. All our lives depend on it. When it gets too damaged to support life, we are going to have to fight over the dwindling store of global life -supporting goodness.

I’m not a judge or a scientist, so I would have thought that 9 “errors” was about normal for a documentary. It’s a truism that, if you know about any topic, you will always find any media reports about that topic to be full of gaping holes.

I would have thought, in this context, that a more suitable topic for the BBC News to consider would be why would anyone spend the enormous sums required to take such a case to the High Court to stop schools showing a documentary? Hadn’t they thought of contacting the school or the local education committee, if they were that stressed about it?

How much did this little exercise cost “school governor Stewart Dimmock, from Dover, a father of two, who is a member of the New Party.”?

The judge awarded Mr Dimmock two-thirds of his estimated legal costs of more than £200,000, against the government.

Are there many parents/school governors out there who are so rich beyond the dreams of avarice that they will spend a sum that would take about 15 years to earn at a minimum wage rate on telling teachers what documentaries they can show in schools?

The New Party? Who are these legally minded philanthropists? Given the sums of money at their disposal, cosying up to them looks like almost as canny a financial move as a brief marriage to a former Beatle.

Popularity: 39% [?]

After mildly slagging off the Wire (that’s British for insulting, I have decided to insert idiomatic translations) I am forced to bow before it. I had forgotten that it ebbs and flows in quality. From great to genius, The episode on Monday on FX was a true work of genius.

The programme focuses on Bodie, di Angelo and Chief Daniels, each of whom is at a pivotal moment. There are so many layers of meaning that it I can’t begin to do it justice. I would be outputting exhuberantly semiotic stuff until next year. And that would be just for one episode.

So, I’ll just pick out a few points in a shamefully lame way.

On third viewing, I realised that Bodie puts on the executioner’s cap before he shoots the other child, in an episode of true horror. After this, he wears it more or less consistently. It expresses Bodie’s having become a “soldier,” a disposable cheap executioner for the Darksdales.

At the moment of the shooting, Bodie’s lieutenant is sobbing. The about-to-be-victim pisses himself. Bodie is horrified at having to shoot a boy. But he is not going to stop what he is doing either. He gets the boy to affirm that he is a man not a boy. Earlier, the about-to-be-shot boy has told Bodie that he is “a man” rather than a boy. At which point he looks about fourteen. Even the killers, despatched by Stringer Bell to do the shooting, look older. And one of the them looks 16.

Bodie has made a sort of low-level Faustian deal with Stringer Bell, as Stringer has implied that he can rise in the business if he gets rid of Ritchie. So, Bodie has already prepared to kill for a slight chance of a small improvement in his circumstances.

The Wire writers are showing us that the soldiers are children, living in desperate poverty and shooting each other over crumbs, both victims and perpetrators of the social values that support the whole system.

The moral implications of this killing are played out for Bodie through later series, as Bodie begins to dissent more and more from his role and to pay a heavy price for becoming an ethical being.

One immediate moral implication is that diAngelo, who has been getting increasingly disenchanted with his part in the Barksdales and is coming to ask himself moral questions about his life, explodes with anger about the murder of the child. This sets in train a decision to betray the gang. Which will soon become an epic moral struggle for him.

Both diAngelo and Bodie find that the development of remorse and the stirring of an ethical conscience do not bring any rewards. I think the Wire breaks some ground here. There is no sense of virtue justly rewarded and villainy justly punished. It is not a simple morality tale. Characters are killed off or survive, partly as a result of their actions but mainly as a consequence of the actions of others. You can’t just step out of “the game” by repenting.

At the same that diAngelo is developing an ethical sense, Chief Daniels is doing the same. There is battle of wits, rather than guns, between Commissioner Burrell and Chief Daniels. Burrell tries to applythe blackmail leverage he’s been holding over Daniels. He is being ordered by the political machine to stop the investigation, because it had uncovered a money relationship between the Barksdale gang and some Senators.

Daniels stands up, literally and metaphorically. As does di Angelo when he challenges Stringer Bell.

Daniels reminds Burrell that others would lose more by exposing him than would Daniels. They would have already used their leverage but for the fact that the greatest fear of the political machine is publicity. They have no intention of using their information against Daniels. So he calls Burrell’s bluff.

This stuff was powerfully moving. The moral complexities are laid out brilliantly through the masterly acting.

(As well as the writing, - taken for granted as pure genius-, the direction, the costumes, the sets, the use of music and anything else you can think of. The HBO marketing is naff, but The Wire’s got to pull an audience to satisfy its paymasters. And for bringing the Sopranos and the Wire to the television, I will forgive HBO pretty well anything.

Popularity: 26% [?]