Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Three
Oh blogging. You are the occasional pastime that makes me absurdly unhappy, for the most part. That’s because I don’t do it as often as I would like, and so when I do I over do it and write posts large enough to choke Cthulhu. And this last post in Listmania metastasised as soon as I started complaining about something; griping posts tend to run out of control. Friend of the blog @Beggarsoshat said to me after my Listmania! Crew Contributions post that he looked forward to me listing my favourite dolly grip of 2011, and after I had stopped crying because of how much he had cut me to the core, I wondered if there was maybe something in that. Why not keep spinning this out? I’m scratching my blogging itch even though all I’m doing is lazily transcribing the thoughts I’ve had lying around in my “mind palace” for months anyway.
But how could I? How could I keep talking about last year’s movies when I’d only seen 120 of them? Simple; why not talk about movies released in 2010? People love reading reviews of movies released 14 months ago. I traditionally do this during Listmania! season as an aside in the last post, but as this post had already gone all top heavy, why not post this section on its own without all of the other photo-heavy stuff I had planned on posting (and which will turn up in Listmania ’11: Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Four, and probably Five, Six and Seven too)? And so here we are, with a couple of thousand words on three movies that I’m sure only a handful of people have already talked about. After all, the first movie here was a pretty obscure little number.
Best Film(s) From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: True Grit / Tangled
Both of these movies were released in the UK just after SoC finished its last Listmania (which was done a lot quicker and with less baloney than this one, I can tell you), but would have radically changed the state of my Best Movies of ’10 completely. Both would have breached the top ten, with True Grit possibly making it into the hallowed and legendary top five of that year. The Coens were coming off the back of one of their least accessible — but most highly regarded — films with A Serious Man, and True Grit represents one of their “crowdpleasers”, if that’s the right word, as they did with No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading. This is a slightly different beast, too dramatic to qualify as one of their comedies, but too funny to be a tragedy. It’s the most successful blending of their two different “flavours” to date.
The pleasures of this magnificent Western are numerous, but the best thing about it is the precise dialogue, which evokes the Wild West in a way only David Milch has ever come close to achieving. This poetry — so often evident in their writing but at its most striking here — is matched by the photography by Roger “King” Deakins, who does career best work with shadows and darkness; the night-time ride to save Mattie is one of the most haunting scenes in recent cinema, a dream painted almost solely with black. Hailee Steinfeld shines in her first role, perfectly riding the line between charmingly forward and obnoxiously precocious. I can picture her playing The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen far more readily than Jennifer Lawrence — an actress I admire but who is too old for the character, as are co-stars Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson.
She’s matched by Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, who both have their own balancing acts to do, between humour and drama. While Bridges has the flashier character to work with, Damon has a harder job, playing a dandified and ridiculous ranger LaBeouf who wins over Mattie and the audience despite being an awful blow-hard. Obviously, he succeeds; with each performance SoC realises how lucky we all are to have such a thoughtful, charming actor working today. This is not to take away from Bridges, though, who is as good here as he is in The Big Lebowski. This was already a late-career classic from the Coens, but his vastly entertaining turn pushes True Grit up there with Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing, and A Serious Man.
But I’ve had trouble figuring out whether I love it more than Disney’s Tangled, which so completely fried my brain at IMAX that I became a fervent and boring proselytist for it for months after. If you’re a 3D sceptic, this is the movie to change your mind. Seeing this in 3D, on that vast screen, was a memorable, tear-inducing experience I shall cherish forever. The whole film is great fun and filled with lovable characters (none more so than defiant horse Maximus), but the most memorable scene is also the single greatest use of 3D I’ve ever seen. Being in that room, dwarfed by the vast IMAX screen, was the most immersive cinema experience I’ve ever had. The illusion of being surrounded by floating lanterns was utterly convincing; when I wasn’t distracted by wiping tears from my eyes, that is.
The songs by Alan Menken feature lyrics from his sometime collaborator Glenn Slater; a happier fit than Stephen Schwartz, at least on this small sampling. They’re rich and funny and charming, reminiscent of his best work with the late, much-missed Howard Ashman. They’re the cherry on top of a superbly well-designed movie, that matches its symbolism (the light motif is present throughout) with its story so deftly that I wanted to applaud throughout. I’ll even go so far as to say… ::deep breath:: …I think I like it more than Beauty and the Beast, and I really loved Beauty and the Beast. It’s a triumph for Disney; a thrilling modernisation of their animation technique that pays humble tribute to the studio’s history, and possibly a portent of great things to come. SoC can’t wait to see what comes next.
Worst Film From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: Morning Glory
Until last year it looked like the movie output of Bad Robot Productions was going to be less diverse than their TV division, which has tried (and failed) to tap non-nerd audiences with Six Degrees and What about Brian? It’s worth praising them for adding Morning Glory to a roster that so far contains only sci-fi and spy movies (not counting Joy Ride), but the addition of something this unchallenging makes you wonder if Bad Robot’s other movies are as cynically produced as this. Even with a terrific cast (including Harrison Ford, in his liveliest performance since The Fugitive) and an interesting director, it has an enormous handicap: a rote script by dreaded screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna.
If Michael Bay is a cinematic villain for aiming all of his movies at the same Mountain-Dew-drinking, FHM-absorbing, Call-Of-Duty-playing fratboy demographic, then can we add Brosh McKenna to Hollywood’s rogues gallery for making numerous movies from the same template in which a doofy woman — with work skills so brilliant and yet so poorly depicted that she almost appears to have mystical powers — has trouble finding a man due to a habit of occasionally bursting with an emotion-geyser like all the normal people don’t. So far ABM has churned out 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and now Morning Glory; it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between them as they come tumbling down the conveyor belt like malformed Barbie dolls.
Among its crimes: trying to make us believe that Rachel McAdams’ awkwardness is representative of some large cross-section of the female audience, and that bagging Patrick “Saintly and Uncomplicated Love Interest” Wilson is some kind of victory for these mythical klutzy women; making Diane Keaton rap with 50 Cent in a display of cinematic desperation unmatched by anything else released in the past four years; punishing McAdams by making her run in high heels in almost every scene, which just makes her look like a lunatic with superhumanly strong ankles; inadvertently making Anchorman — a Dada-esque comedy — the superior comment on the treatment of women in the TV industry; setting up Harrison Ford as a villain with the AWFUL crime of criticising McAdams’ fringe/bangs; making me pine for another Bridget Jones sequel just to stop Brosh McKenna from going back to that dried-up well.
Worst of all, it attempts to make a case for breakfast news as something worthwhile, something as necessary as serious investigative journalism. Ford’s Mark Pomeroy is portrayed as a conceited horse’s ass who has a snooty attitude to the fripperies of breakfast TV, objecting to the clowning of Daybreak’s jokiest segments. We’re meant to be excited when he abandons his serious self in order to make a frittata in an effort to magically summon McAdams from her job interview with NBC (because all job interviews are done in the morning while you’re supposed to be at work).
This character moment, which shows what he is willing to sacrifice in order to placate his producer McAdams, softens him — a nice twist on the romcom trope where a romantic interest humbles himself in order to win the girl. And yet no matter what side-effects this final act has, we can’t escape the fact that this is a betrayal of a good point personified by the grizzled old news hound pining for his old career. All the way through the movie he’s right about the importance of investigative journalism, and McAdams is so averse to his philosophy that he has to lie to her to get her to cover the scandal story he’s been trying to tell her about for weeks, and only seems to recognise its value for the sake of plot convenience. And to stop her looking like a complete idiot.
This is similar to the scene in Devil Wears Prada in which Meryl Streep defends fashion from criticisms that it isn’t important. It’s a very well-acted speech by a great actress, but her claims that high fashion is what eventually trickles down to the lowest forms of clothing — that the Cerulean blue she celebrates in haute couture one month becomes the blue that everyone wears later — isn’t really the answer to the question “why should we care about fashion”, because if we weren’t wearing that shade of blue we’d just wear another. What she’s arguing for is the influence of fashion journalism, which is fine, but it’s a bit disingenuous to assume that without Vogue we wouldn’t know how to dress ourselves. Though I will say InStyle is a fine publication (one for @Ms_RH there).
So here we’re meant to swallow the line that breakfast TV is an essential component of the news cycle, that it acts as the “sugar” that sweetens the “fibre” that constitutes news. As if the world isn’t awash with sugar, while fibre is rarely present in our news diet. Anyone who watches, say, BBC Breakfast (which SoC has railed against before), will note that what little serious news is shown inbetween puff pieces and appearances by the magnificently oleaginous Chris DeBurgh is poorly researched, biased, and revealing of the presenters’ poor preparation. Any time the show covers matters of popular culture more racy than Midsomer Murders, or youth issues, will know that this is less fibre, more asbestos.
So to see a movie attempt to make excuses for something inconsequential, when in actual fact it’s salty and challenging investigative journalism that needs to be celebrated, is like hearing the self-defensive and unconvincing justifications of someone caught watching something frowned upon by others — say for example, a cliche-ridden Aline Brosh McKenna movie that sets back gender politics about 20 years. If you want to watch a breakfast show that spends more time covering Al Roker being a clown than it does serious issues, that’s your prerogative. If you want to argue that this is important, do it by making your case, not by belittling serious journalism. And Bad Robot? Stick to what you know best (i.e. lens flares).
Will this ever end? Can I keep this going forever? If not, I’m taking a break from it as soon as Listmania! is finally brought to heel, which will either be by mass reader apathy or a typing coma.
BBC Breakfast Watch: Tweaking Shatner’s Bassoon
[Note to new readers: for the record, I've had other meltdowns over the offensive content of BBC Breakfast, usually about their treatment of young guests on the show or their poorly-researched and alarmist comments on technology. Here are my previous rants, ordered chronologically:
- Why Grand Theft Auto will turn your children into murderous pimp rapists.
- The English language has been made illegal by children who can only talk in Robot-Speak.
- Wii Fit is trying to create legions of anorexic children by being mean to them.
- Sick-brained Americans want to turn our babies into prostitutes and piercings will make your skin fester.
- Online gaming will either turn you into a dessicated husk like in Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce or will make you disconnect from humanity entirely even though online gaming is all about meeting people... erm....
- Political cartoonists are just big meanies and I hates them WAAAAHHHHH!]
It’s been a while since Shades of Caruso has addressed the aggressive Daily-Mail-esque ignorance of the news-and-Strictly-Come-Dancing info update service known as BBC Breakfast, but then it’s been a while since they’ve been as stupid as they were this morning, probably because Kate Silverton was on there for a while being much more sensible than the other presenters. Oh sure, every so often one of the presenters — usually Bill “Confusion” Turnbull — will treat a teenager like a cross between Charles Manson and Typhoid Mary, or Sian “Disapproving” Williams will bring her withering school-marm-esque Victorian sensibilities to bear on some poor person who thought they were just going on another stage of a PR tour for a book, not a Spanish-Inquisition-style interrogation as to why they are a Satanist in disguise, but these things happen so often that it would get very boring for me (and, of course, for you, dear reader) if I came on here every day and said, “Bill just acted like the atheist he was interviewing was chewing on baby-flavoured gum and masturbating all over their tacky chat-sofa”. Though I have been tempted.
Today, though? Hoooooo-boy. I was struggling to extricate myself from bed while being pinned down by multiple angry cats when Daisyhellcakes started using the profane language she saves for extra-stupid segments on Breakfast. It’s like the Bat-Symbol being flashed over Gotham when she does that. I put my ass into high gear, and 35 minutes later I’d made it downstairs to watch one of the most shockingly biased interviews I’ve ever seen, which can be summed up in the phrase “Concerned Parent Armed With Zero Knowledge But Infinite Outrage Vs. Scientist Making Good Points”. It was the worst kind of interview: one where the interviewer refuses to accept the information given to him by the interviewee, and actively goes out of his way to distort the interviewee’s message in order to quash it.
Before I get into it, here’s the caveat I always have to crack out when I take on Breakfast. Yes, this is not Newsnight. We’re not talking about Mecha-Paxman here. This is not the Today programme with John “Sarcastic Voice” Humphrys, and it’s not even The Politics Show with Andrew “Brillo Pad” Neil (a man I should hate for his terrible behaviour during the News Corp strikes, but would get on my “People I Would Like To Have A Beer With” list). Breakfast is one notch above Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail column, which means it’s two notches above Jan Moir’s column. This is where rationality and relevance goes to die, and so my heart bleeds for poor Professor David Nutt from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, who was interviewed by Charlie “Young Bill Turnbull” Stayt after Nutt, during a lecture, criticised the government’s decision to reclassify cannabis as a Class B drug.
Of course, the Daily Mail beat Breakfast to the punch with this article, but to be honest, even though it features a few snide digs and references to outraged comments from drugs campaigners that haven’t actually happened yet — a typical Mail trick to create the illusion of controversy when there is none is to say “His comments are likely to prove explosive” –it’s a bit more balanced than the Breakfast coverage. The Mail even quotes Richard Garside, director of the CCJS, who said, “Professor Nutt’s briefing gives us an insight into what drugs policy might look like if it was based on the research evidence, rather than political posturing and moralistic positioning.” That they put this comment in without making monstering Garside is a real surprise, though yes, it is at the bottom of the article. They’re not going to put something like that in the first paragraph.
Breakfast, on the other hand, dived in with both Fists of Fury flying. Taking place via super-futuristic vid link, Charlie Stayt quizzed Prof. Nutt — who was in the BBC Bristol studio — about his statement, and the good Professor talked about scientific evidence and popular opinion pointing to cannabis as being a Class C drug rather than a Class B drug, and mentioned that arrest for possession of a Class C drug carries with it the possibility of a two-year prison sentence (I assume for possession of large quantities. Two years for having a half-smoked lump of black in your pocket seems pretty harsh). Fair enough, but nothing was going to stop Stayt. Having got the pleasantries out of the way, Stayt then said:
If I’m looking through — and correct me if I’m wrong — if I look through what you’re saying at this stage, it seems to me one of the things you’re saying is that, effectively, taking LSD, sort of on a given night, is the equivalent of having a beer. [At this moment Prof. Nutt looks a little startled, though I could be misreading his reaction] Now a lot of people think that just doesn’t make any sense. Is that effectively what you are saying?
Prof. Nutt immediately points out that Stayt has started talking about a lecture he gave in July, which has nothing to do with what he did last night. That report concerned population impact of all drugs, both prohibited and accepted by the mainstream, such as booze and fags. Nutt said:
In the UK at present, LSD actually causes very little harm. Because it’s relatively little used it has a low propensity to cause dependence. And so in comparison with other drugs, in particular drugs like alcohol which are very very heavily used with very high levels of dependence and toxicity, the LSD would rank more low… lower because it’s relatively — in population terms — safer.
These comments made by Nutt earlier in the year have followed him around ever since, but then that’s exactly what happens when someone uses an inflammatory but pithy soundbite to describe a series of statistical observations. It’s especially annoying when those stats seem to make so much sense. Anyone who wanders the streets of London between 10pm and midnight will know exactly how widespread alcohol usage is. Where are all the hallucinating fools sitting on the tube and screaming about the gargoyles climbing up their legs or telling everyone around them how connected they feel to The Cosmic Mesh? Okay, they’re at home, probably, but at least they’re not starting fights, accosting women, or falling down escalators. Sadly, Stayt is immune to statistical truth, and continued to ignore Nutt’s findings with studied and insulting insistence:
Yeah, it’s funny though, isn’t it, cuz if you… if you… Say you think about this as a parent, and you think about your child, you’ve got a teenage child, and you think well… I know you’re saying that “LSD, cannabis and Ecstasy are less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes”. Now, if you ask a parent which of those you want your child experimenting with, I would suspect — and I’m not sure about this — they might say they really don’t want them experimenting with Ecstasy and LSD, and drinks and cigarettes, they might think, is the better of the options, but you seem to be presenting it the other way around!
How many parents out there are saying to their kids, “Right, I’ll let you experiment with one drug of choice, and you can take your pick. Oh shit! Not LSD! Wouldn’t you rather try some nutritious Guinness?” Stayt makes it sound like parents are giving their kids an option of trying just one, and the horror of Nutt’s report is that now kids will be picking LSD instead of booze. Of course, if the findings of the scientific community are right, then this would be a good thing, because — drumroll — it’s less dangerous than alcohol. This finding will not penetrate Stayt’s head, though. LSD is more dangerous than booze, and science has a terribly immoral pro-hallucinogenic bias. Stab science with a big knife because it is so evil!
Anyway, this is how the rest of the interview went, though the transcript sadly doesn’t capture the clarity of Nutt’s responses, nor the sneering and patronising anti-rational questioning by Stayt:
Nutt: [Re: Stayt's last question] Well, that’s precisely why we’re having this debate, because it’s very difficult to give guidance to parents, because these drugs are all very toxic in different ways, and what I am doing is engaging you — and, hopefully, the general population, including parents — in a debate about this. Today… tonight, a child in the UK will die of alcohol poisoning. No one will die of LSD. And that’s the kind of issue that parents should really be taking onboard: what advice do you give to your children when they go out and they drink heavily? Alcohol is currently the biggest, most worrying killer of the drugs that we’re not really grappling with under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
Stayt: Yeeaahh, well I’m not suggesting that alcohol doesn’t have its problems too. If we talk about cigarettes, for example… Now in relation to cannabis, are you saying there is a link with mental illness or not? Is it just a possibility?
Nutt: [talking over Stayt's last sentence, probably because he's sickened by the level of debate] Oh, cannabis is not good for mental health. Cannabis certainly can make schizophrenia worse if you’ve got it, but what has confused people is this claim that it is the cause of schizophrenia. Well, it contributes to a very small percentage of the cases of schizophrenia, and most people who smoke cannabis do not end up getting schizophrenia or psychosis from it.
Stayt: And do you know, one of the problems is — I’m sure you must be aware of this — there is a possibility that people listening to your sort of train of thought on this… and I know you’re trying to prompt debate, but in the gist of what you’re saying, there will be some people who come away from this thinking, “D’you know what, these drugs — LSD, cannabis, Ecstasy — they’re not so bad, really”, and that might be the message people get from what you’re saying.
Nutt: Well, the message they should get from what I’m saying is that they are bad but they’re not as bad as heroin and crack. That’s why I think it’s really critical that the Misuse of Drugs Act properly represents the global harms of the drugs that are controlled in the Act, because unless the Act is correct, we can’t give the right message.
After which Stayt thanked the Professor and we got to see a shot of co-presenter Susanna Reid looking like she was sucking the world’s biggest Disapproval Lemon. Daisyhellcakes saved her biggest expression of disdain for Stayt’s playacting of a foolish teenager thinking the report was pro-drugs, shouting out, “They’ve trotted out the Hypothetical Idiot!” Long-time readers will know that I’ve railed against the rhetorical use of the Hypothetical Idiot in the past, as shown in the posts I’ve linked to above, because everyone knows that no matter what you do, someone out there (“there” being the mind of an aggrieved and ill-informed paranoid desperate to win an argument by creating numerous straw-men) will use any idea or object to kill themself and millions of others, thus justifying the banning of any piece of information or any object just in case someone uses it as a weapon.
That’s not even the worst part of the interview, though. The moment that enraged me the most was Stayt accusing Nutt of unintentionally promoting the use of drugs by talking about them in a way that could be misinterpreted while deliberately and repeatedly misinterpreting the findings himself. The man is a cretin. Get him off TV now before he further defecates all over the public forum. We don’t need his kind of alarmist, knee-jerk moralising getting in the way of adult discussion when there are plenty of people out there who will think Stayt is speaking from a position of intellectual certainty and superiority simply because he’s wearing a suit on the telly.
Compare his snide interview with the news bulletin coverage just a few minutes earlier, which quotes Nutt’s concern over the reclassification of cannabis potentially leading to an increase in usage. The more transgressive a drug seems, the more attractive it becomes to rebellious teens. Isn’t this obvious? We’re so busy treating teenagers like criminals in waiting without even trying to address the psychology of pubertal and post-pubertal kids, just assuming they’re bound to break the law without considering the societal prejudices and actions that can trigger this behaviour. During the short news piece on Nutt’s lecture is a voxpop from Debra Bell, who runs the website Talking About Cannabis. Mrs. Bell has been chronicling her son’s drug use and rehabilitation for several years now, attracting the attention of the UK press and some angry bloggers. Of course, as this was a voxpop Mrs. Bell’s comments were not challenged at all, and again she seemed oblivious to the psychology of teenagers, thinking that telling them cannabis is bad for you and is frowned upon by the authorities will be enough to make kids reconsider smoking the drugs.
She also seemed to think that Prof. Nutt was actually saying cannabis should be downgraded to Class C because it’s not harmful at all, which is not what he is saying. I get the feeling that the only acceptable way to describe the effects of cannabis is to scream “IT WILL SEND YOU TO HELL AND SATAN WILL SODOMISE YOU WITH A TRIDENT-SHAPED BONG!” Anything less than that is to imply that dope-smoke is little more than fragrant air, and all of those deaths from cannabis usage will be on your hands, mister! Of course, Mrs. Bell was concerned that telling kids the truth about drugs was the most important thing, but her page of “facts” about cannabis features many statistics that have been debunked by Godlike super-genius Ben Goldacre, so she’s the last person who we should be listening to on this subject.
I’m not one who takes illicit substances anyway, but the interview is offensively biased enough that I just have to rail against it, howling into the emptiness like an impotent wolf bellowing at the uncaring moon. This interview was, as if often the case on Breakfast, a fucking debacle. Any attempt to increase the public’s knowledge about any moral issue is treated with disrespect and distrust, with the ill-prepared and incurious presenters relying on willful ignorance and hearsay, Old Wives’ tales and superstition. It’s taken as fact that the BBC’s news operation is the best in the world, but with this carbuncle on its face, how are we to ever take it seriously? I know breakfast TV is meant to be trivial, but treating important issues in this way is making things far worse. They should have a serious journalist in reserve on set, someone who can rush out and present something like this instead of relying on a fellow who, during an undemanding interview with Enid Blyton’s grand-daughter Sophie Smallwood, commented on her work on a new classic Noddy book by saying:
Stayt: It’s a big responsibility, isn’t it. Cuz, obvi… I mean, you knew your grandmother very well…
Smallwood: Well, no…
Stayt: Did you?
Smallwood: I was two years after she died.
Nice work, BBC. This is exactly the guy you need interviewing scientists about their research. (Sidenote: the small feature on Noddy showed a short clip from the recent TV show, which updated the character, and true to form, both Charlie and Susanna regarded it the way a reluctant babysitter regards a soiled nappy.)
Of course, the embarrassing and biased interviews are not the only bad things featured on Breakfast. This morning’s installment also featured the most information-free puff-piece I’ve seen on TV recently: a survey — probably taken in a conference room within Television Centre when someone realised Breakfast was going to run three minutes short one morning — says men are crying at films more often. Cue lots of free-publicity for Up, with “comedy” reporter Tim Muffett — talking to a psychologist about what makes people cry when they watch movies. FYI, according to Dr. Simon Moore:
In terms of the characteristics of a kind of a “sob-film”, or a “weepie” as we might call it, there are technical skills you could use in terms of facial expression, you can use colour. Sound, for example, or lack of it. All these things could, for certain individuals, have an effect, but it won’t happen for everybody.
I’ve always said that Kubrick’s use of white in 2001 is what makes that film such an emotional rollercoaster. I’m sure it was the lovely balloons that made my cry while watching Up, not the emotional connection you feel towards a man who has lost the love of his life after decades of loving companionship. God forbid it would be empathy that causes these emotional responses. It must be brane-science and some kind of subliminal tricksiness! The worst comment made during this most desperate of time-filling fripperies came from Peter Bradshaw, much to my horror. When talking about Up (surely the most emotionally devastating movie of the year), he said:
I was one of those people sobbing away like a baby. It’s all the more sad because you don’t expect it. This is a kind of high-gloss digital family comedy from Pixar Disney. You don’t expect to be moved. You don’t expect to be moved to tears.
He’s got a point. Disney and Pixar have never…
…ever…
…ever…
…ever…
…even tried to make audiences cry before.
::Disclaimer – None of the quotes in this post are fabricated. Not even the “sob-film” one. They have been very carefully transcribed from my Sky+ box, and the idiocy contained within is not my property or my fault. Sorry for foisting it upon my readers, who deserve better.::
ETA, date 30.10.09: As the Mail predicted, Professor Nutt’s comments did indeed provoke outrage, as Home Secretary Alan Johnson has had him removed as head of the Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs, saying he has created “public confusion between scientific advice and policy”. So, basically, it’s not whether he is right or wrong. He’s just not towing the party line. Pathetic. It’s obvious the ACMD is only there to back up governmental policy with a veneer of scientific authority. Drugs policy in this country continues its backwards march.
BBC Breakfast Watch! Bill Turnbull Gets Pictorially PWNed
It’s been a while since I’ve watched this with a proper amount of attention, but I just had to mention this morning’s edition. As Gordon Brown has been revealed to have a thin skin about political cartoons depicting him as too fat, Sian and Bill spoke to cartoonist Martin Rowson about it. Turns out Rowson once met Brown before he became Chancellor, and after asking him a serious question about economics, Brown chided him for the corpulence of his lampoons. This, apparently, stuck in Rowson’s craw, which is why he, in particular, draws Brown as especially large.
Anyway, after discussing his methods for a while, Bill and Sian made nervous comments about Rowson sizing them up for a drawing, and he revealed that he already had. Sorry for the crappy quality of this picture, but I had to use my terrible phone to take a shot of it. (Click on it for more detail. Oh, and copyright Martin Rowson, obviously.)
I’m not sure what’s going on with Sian, but his depiction of Bill is genius. This picture, provided for comparison, doesn’t do the accuracy of the caricature justice, sadly.
Of course Bill, being the delicate flower he is, took massive umbrage at it, and made sniffy remarks for the next few minutes. At first it seemed like he was trying to laugh off his “jowly” appearance, as Sian put it, but when she tried to pat his chins he got a bit arsy, and cutting back to them after a news bulletin he seemed genuinely annoyed. I loved every second of it.
Quick celebrity encounter story: I met Rowson once at a talk with political comic writer/artist Joe Sacco at the ICA. While waiting to get my copy of Notes From a Defeatist, Rowson walked past and I collared him to thank him for a deeply offensive and hilarious cartoon about the Orange Walk that had just taken place with its typical levels of controversy. I think he thought I was going to tell him off about it. Poor guy. He was very nice about it. Joe Sacco was lovely as well. We chatted about his comic strip of a guy rebelling against work by furiously masturbating, and I said it put my frustrations about work into a much-needed perspective. He signed my book with an exhortation to get out of my soul-crushing job ASAP*, but I was so flustered about the growing queue of fans behind me that I rushed away without looking at what he wrote until later. He looked hurt that I didn’t react to his generous message, which I still feel bad about even to this day.
Anyway, here’s my favourite picture by Rowson in a while, dealing with the BBC’s rejection of a DEC-endorsed appeal for Gaza, and the return of humour-void Jonathan Ross to TV. And yes, I didn’t say much about Bill and Sian, did I. It was just me expressing a burst of delicious schadenfreude, that’s all.
* Funny I should recall that now.
BBC Breakfast Watch! World Of Warcraft Will Kill You Stone Dead
I’ve not watched BBC Breakfast for a while, replacing the misery of watching Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams (aka Mail-tuttery-personified) with the endurance test that is Atlas Shrugged. Well, I say that, but I will admit to taking a break from that as well, so that I could binge on Ed Brubaker’s genius run on Captain America (surely the classic Cap run) and Ultimate Spider-Man by Bendis (on top form, thankfully) and Stuart Immonen. I know! I should end that frigging book, but I needed to see the new Captain America kick some right-wingers around, especially now that they’re feeling so down. Obama’s got a mandate, bitches! A mandate! Suck it up!
Anyway, this morning I paid more attention to BBC Breakfast than is healthy, primarily because today some evil corporate bastards have unleashed a new weapon against humanity, striking against our precious children by chaining them to an artificial reality in order to drain them of their resources, their souls, their potential. Such an apocalyptic event deserved full expression of their dismay, as they tried valiantly to prevent the theft of an entire generation. Yes, though it sickens me to say it, Blizzard released another WoW expansion pack. Those evil mind-controlling motherfuckers! Save the children from that thing we don’t quite understand but will distrust anyway just to be on the safe side!
As soon as I saw the two disapproving parent-archetypes sitting on their sofa with all of the moral authority of two angry bags of compost, announcing the imminent discussion with all of the severity their little brains could muster, my heart sank. As I have said before when railing against this most insultingly alarmist show, I understand that early morning TV is meant to be light, but surely the release of an MMORPG expansion pack for one of the most successful, popular, and beloved games in the world is not going to bring about the death of childhood, and so acting like it is is surely the antithesis of “light chatter”. I missed the start of the show, but Canyon informed me that even before their little snippy piece about the game began, they predictably brought up the death of a South Korean gamer from exhaustion which, in traditional BBC Breakfast style, was linked to World of Warcraft when, in fact, the guy died playing Starcraft. A small point, but indicative of the rigour with which the disapproving Luddites had researched the piece.
I almost didn’t watch. It’s been a while since I spent time watching Bill and Sian, simply because they make me so mad I can barely stand it. For all I know they have been railing against gaming with miserable regularity. “The release of a game called The Force Unleashed has raised concerns that children may turn to the Dark Side after playing it.” “This game, Spore, encourages children to cultivate and eat diseases!” “Your children are at threat from LittleBigPlanet, which might make your children sew themselves into sacks!” Of course, this morning they were particularly terrible, using their stern faces to register disgust over the thought of anyone daring to play computer games which corrupt minds and destroy lives and many other imaginary things.
Though they’ve done this before, and even though they were talking (down) to three WoW fans instead of having some typically ineffectual and token balanced debate (which is usually conducted with the inclusion of some non-gaming crazy person with a head full of suspicion and fear), their behaviour this morning was even more snotty and dismissive as usual, probably because they resented wasting their time discussing something as “silly” as a game when OMG! They had the thrill of introducing a previously filmed clip of a BBC journo on a press junket interviewing Angelina Jolie about Changeling! The glamour of presenting BBC Breakfast should never be sullied with something as decadent and corrupting as a mere game. Get off our sofa, worthless fools, I could imagine Sian saying, as Bill sits and devours numerous custard creams while humming the theme to Dixon of Dock Green.
I felt especially bad for one player, Marijke Jensen, who was still clad in the Night Elf costume she had been wearing to the special release event at HMV Oxford Circus last night. It was a cool costume, and — after Bill had expressed a somewhat unhealthy interest in it — she seemed to not expect his sneering “Whyyyyyyyyyyy?” because, you know, you don’t think a TV presenter would be openly rude and dismissive like that. Luckily she was friendly enough to defuse the moment with a genial acknowledgement that wearing something like that might seem extreme to, say, a trad-dad square from the McCarthy era magically transported to W1, 2008. The other guests — a hardcore player (Ben West) who had also attended the launch, and Tim Edwards from PC Gamer Magazine — then had to put up with Bill and Sian stumbling to understand what the game involves, not to mention returning to the same goddamn question, over and over again, about how long people play it. The poor guy who attended the launch, who had waited 36 hours in line, was mocked by Bill for waiting so long, but at least he tried to explain that he did it for the feeling of being a part of something, a community of like-minded people, that playing the game is a social thing and leads to real friendships (as regular Shades of Caruso visitor Jaredan can attest to). It’s something Bill can’t understand, as the only community he belongs to is Daily Mail Island, and they despise the BBC. It must be horribly depressing for him.
The piece continued for only a few minutes, but it felt like a million years, with both presenters tut-tutting at the amount of time devoted players spent on the game, and then reading out one viewer email from a Concerned Mother who complained at her 18-year old son’s daily WoW marathons (12 hours a day, which seems excessive and probably exaggerated for effect), stating that he has no friends. Of course, anyone who plays the game will know that it’s very easy to make friends online, and the game depends on social interaction and cooperation, but parents (and Bill and Sian, obviously) won’t accept that because internet friends can’t possibly exist or mean anything to their children, oblivious to the fact that they are probably grateful to meet people with the same hobby as them, who don’t judge them for doing something they enjoy. After that single negative email Sian deigned to read a positive one, prefaced with the dismissive and frustrated bleat, “I have to say, the majority have been positive because they do play the game,” which is the perfect example of how her mind remains closed against new information. Closed, because otherwise all of the Hypothetical Idiots she has invented will come spilling out, babbling hysterically, running into traffic, or eating quicklime, or maybe even playing a computer game for eight days without a break and then dying from dehydration.
As I said earlier, this anti-gaming suspicion is something I’ve gone on about before, and it’s a really silly thing to get annoyed about, but the Today Programme is also getting in on the technophobia with a depressingly one-sided report, and the BBC News homepage features this special report, which makes me suspect the corporation is secretly really pissed at the failure of Fightbox. (Night Elf Marijke is on the far left on the homepage picture.)
Still, despite the depressing blanket suspicion across the BBC’s coverage, I’m most incensed by Bill and Sian’s obnoxious behaviour, telling their guests off for playing WoW for any amount of time (Bill kept tutting, “That’s still a lot” no matter what the response), frowning constantly and belittling them for having an interest in something they don’t understand. With the only “professional” interviewed being a young journalist, they felt free to treat their guests like ill-behaved delinquents, sniping at them and their hobby with distasteful arrogance. Even Bill’s “jokes” about the Night Elf’s ears were framed as a nasty side-effect of playing too long.
Obviously there is an issue about compulsive playing there; I’d be crazy to deny it (probably driven crazy by obsessive gaming!). However, any pursuit can potentially create obsessive behaviour in those who follow it, and many of the complaints about WoW are coming from parents whose children, who have retreated into what they see as a pointless fantasy world, would probably retreat into some other world away from their parents if they weren’t gaming. It’s called adolescence, and is a fact of life. Nevertheless, that coverage is not what annoys me. It’s the distrustful attitude of much of the mainstream media, possibly resentful that young eyeballs are being stolen by gaming (or whatever the dehumanising term for viewing figure decline is this week), that gaming is always framed in terms of the harm it must do to children, that it is never seen as a positive thing or a potential source of much artistic value, that the fact that it brings people together is treated with much amusement by commentators stuck in their 20th Century world and unable to believe that social networking via any new form of technology can be enormously empowering and, at its most base level, a lot of fun. Families are being formed or brought together because of these developments. It’s not threatening our way of life, it’s enhancing it. Embrace our machine friends!
Most immediately, though, I’m furious about the rude attitude of Bill and Sian, who acted like stern parents to these total strangers, all of whom are over the age of 18 and surely deserving of some respect. It was bordering on bullying behaviour, to be honest, and I’m sick of seeing gamers treated like potentially unstable children. Even worse, I feel especially bad for gamers who have been up all night, filled with excitement about the release of a long-awaited expansion pack and happy to have been part of a joyful event populated by people who share the same interests as them, turning up to a BBC studio to enthuse about their hobby only to be treated like delusional freaks or criminals by the sub-moronic presenters of this appalling, amateurish, poorly researched piece of shit show.
Compare Bill and Sian’s awful treatment of the three gamers with their fawning interview of singer and sentient oil slick Jonathan Ansell, whose oleaginous insincerity was only matched by their boundless delight at his dreary anecdotes about how wonderful he is. A truly nauseating display. If I could I’d organise a boycott of the show by bombarding gamer and legendary literary leviathan Charlie Brooker with incensed all-caps emails, but that’s just the fatigue-induced temporary insanity talking, and has nothing to do with my recent Civilisation Revolution binges, which have lasted for up to five hours. Nothing to do with that at all.
Still, it was not all misery. They also had Dragon’s Den judge Duncan Bannatyne on. I’ve yet to express my immense frustration at these pompous, self-aggrandising sinkholes who have convinced the BBC — a publicly funded corporation — to air a show that allows them to interview inventors and cherry-pick the best ideas for investment, from which they then make a fat wad of cash. Truly imaginative entrepreneurial thinking, there. Of course, I take great pleasure every time I hear that one of their rejects — usually dismissed with derision and laughter — has become a huge success without their minimal investment (usually offered in exchange for almost punitive shares in the new businesses). If I came up with a solid idea, the last thing I would do is give these crooks a chance to absorb my profits with their rapacious plundering.
Anyway, Bannatyne was on, and looking grumpier than usual. I wonder why? (There was a copy of the Sun sitting around the studio earlier in the show, during the sports news, and I can imagine it was whisked away and hidden with a quickness once they were done with it. Poor Duncan.)
ETA: Good to see I’m not the only one annoyed by Sian and Bill’s arrogant embrace of technological ignorance, and worded with far more elegance than I can muster to boot.
BBC Breakfast Watch! Almost Not FAIL For Once?
I come not to bury BBC Breakfast, but to praise it! And bury it a little. Nothing big or particularly memorable, and nothing to justify a post, but it did do one thing very well this morning; make me excited about the Doctor Who season four finale. I won’t say too much about it all because the thrill of being caught out by the penultimate episode was so great I wouldn’t want to ruin it for any non-UK fans stumbling across this blog, but let’s just say, I think about 9 million Brit Who fans are in a state of extreme freak-out-itude over the last episode.
That penultimate episode was mostly horrible, with all sorts of hilarious dialogue about Osterhagen Keys, Project Indigo, and oh Christ, yet more stupid alien languages and dire crazytalk (was Dalek James Caan secretly Drusilla in disguise?), the ever-awesome MARTHA JONES handicapped with an unflattering semi-Hitler hairdo, not to mention Penelope Wilton being annoying and Billie Piper’s peculiar mouth distortion still going unexplained, plus lots of shots of her with a ludicrous spacegun, none of which helped dispel my general antipathy to all things Rose Tyler (and wow, we’ve got the return of her mom and useless Mickey to look forward to? Someone restrain me before I bite off my tongue with excitement).
Luckily it was saved by many superbly integrated references to previous episodes that seemed to hint that perhaps Russell T. Davies had been planning this finale all along, some top crossover moments, some all-time great line readings from John Barrowman at his most wonderfully Barrowmanesque, Richard Dawkins’ cameo, and the knowledge that Canyon’s least favourite Who villains weren’t ruined by that godawful Daleks Take Manhattan two parter in season three. She even got excited enough to shout at the screen with joy (sample quote, “Yay! Torchwood is going to be destroyed! Go Daleks! Exterminate them all! Except Captain Jack, of course.”).
The show highlight, though, was the final scene, featuring the best cliffhanger of the year. Massive, massive, kudos to the BBC for managing to keep that unbelievably big surprise under wraps; I doubt anyone knew it was coming up, and the press blackout for tomorrow’s denouement has been total, as far as I can tell (I’m not about to go looking for spoilers). I salute you, as does the ever-dashing Captain Jack and the Duh Twins.
Anyway, BBC Breakfast interviewed Freema Agyeman again this morning (she seems to be unofficial spokesman for the show, as she has been on before), and she was as endearingly enthusiastic about the show as ever. She even keeps it up when talking about Torchwood. Miraculous! Obviously she was asked about a thousand times as to the outcome of that brilliant cliffhanger by hosts Charlie Stayt and Susanna Reid, and Freema kept totally shtum. That was to be expected. What did please me was the unfaked enthusiasm of all of them. It was infectious and exciting, and nothing like the usual indifferent puff pieces that pollute the airwaves in the morning. It made me even more anxious to see the finale, which is just the sort of thing these interviews should be doing. It was a rare moment of competence.
Of course, it was not perfect. Freema was in happiness mode, but Charlie, who had already turned an inconsequential interview with James Alexandrou (promoting a play) into a dour interrogation about the awful wave of knife crime currently blighting the UK, did the same with MARTHA JONES. It was the same whiplash tonal shift from, “ZOMG what will happen to the Doctor?!?!” to, “What do you think about these recent tragic deaths?” It was a question aimed at her more because of her age than her ethnic background, I think. At least I hope so. If Alexandrou got asked too it seems they think that everyone under 25 who isn’t employed by the BBC is a blade-wielding scumbag or has a valuable perspective on blade-wielding scumbags, so I’ll give them a break on that. Poor Freema had to downshift her mood accordingly, and amusingly praised the C4 drama Fallout instead of talking about the Beeb’s coverage of same (which is nothing like as bold as the Disarming Britain season on the alternative channel).
Still, it was a rare human moment on the show that didn’t involve stupidity, ineptitude, or luddite yammerings. Congrats where congrats are due. Normal service (i.e. missed cues, fear of the future, Bill Turnbull lowering the world average IQ by about 100 points) will be resumed immediately.
BBC Breakfast Watch! Pierced Bits, Baby Hookers, and Wu-Tang Clan
I had a lovely couple of days not watching BBC Breakfast this week, meaning my IQ managed to crawl back up a couple of points like a bead of mercury in a thermometer. Sadly, that was undone this morning with a number of, “Why do the children have their own culture, and how will it kill them?” pieces that shattered my brain thermometer and froze the IQ mercury solid. Thanks, Charlie Stayt and Susanna Reid! The first piece involved a report on a British Medical Journal survey into piercings and the number of people who end up seeking medical help after part of their face turns green and purple like Harvey Dent, during which Susanna and resident skittish doctor Rosemary Leonard reacted to the presence of a pierced youngster as if a farting Predator was sitting between them, so strong was their incomprehension and revulsion.
The kid, Toby Caldecott, acquitted himself easily as well as previous guest Lucy Van Amerongen, treating the trio of hyper-concerned adults with mild disdain as they misunderstood the nature of what they were talking about, and eloquently defending the salon he worked at. That was of course not good enough for the hosts, who were trying to make out, as usual, that kids were running around with enough metal in their faces to weigh their heads down. My favourite moment was the wince of disgust that passed across Leonard’s face as she revealed that, ZOMG!, some people have piercings ::gulp:: in the genital area. Whatever will they think of a long time ago next?
The whole silly piece ended with the following exchange:
Susanna: And… and… Why? Why do you do it? Why do you get so many piercings?
Toby: Me personally, because I like the way they look. There’s nothing else to it than that really.
Susanna: Simple as that? Well, they certainly look striking.
I think she expected him to respond, “Well, I have piercings because secretly I hate myself and society, and use this as a way to flagellate myself and terrify passers-by. Later on today I plan on sacrificing a virgin! That’ll be fun.” To be honest, the piece was not the worst. For a start, there was a serious point to be made about amateurs botching it and getting infected, and Leonard did seem to give the kid a break. Our presenters, though, struggled (as ever) to figure out how to treat the subject, obviously uncomfortable at the thought of getting a piercing anywhere other than in the earlobe, and coming across as secretly annoyed at their guest for daring to do it. When the subject of only giving piercings to over-18s came up, Charlie asked Toby if he checks their IDs. No, you fucking cretin, he just guesses using tea-leaves! Unbelievable.
As I say, it wasn’t too bad, but it seemed worse as it sat alongside other stupid pieces filled with fretting about that Hypothetical Idiot that gets wheeled out to prove their points. Yesterday there was a little feature about Lenore Skenazy, the mother who threw her son to the wolves of New York like he was young Leonidas in 300, and the verdict there seemed to be “BURN THE WITCH!” with the odd sop to, “Well, we do cosset our kids, but the world is terrifying, I know because I read the Mail and watch BBC Breakfast BURN THE WITCH!”. Today had an even more peculiar item, about a US firm making high heels for babies. It’s all becoming very “Barbara Wintergreen” on BBC Breakfast.
While the invention of these shoes is worth railing against (because hell’s bells, it’s tacky), the report featured another appearance by Reverend Tim Jones, who was dragged on a while back after having a hissy fit in a shop about Playboy stationery aimed at children. He was the epitome of indignant rage then, but was muted this time, admitting that silly decorative high heels for babies wasn’t the end of the world (something he would know about, obviously), but that it was still bad to have children thinking of themselves in terms of “sexy adulthood”. Perhaps when they’re old enough to recognise gender stereotypes and perhaps misunderstand the power of sexuality, but we’re talking about children who are so young they are still learning how to differentiate between object and subject. I don’t think a baby wearing stupid joke high heels is going to turn into a pre-toddler Carrie Bradshaw. That point was made by Susanna, bless her, but it barely deterred Reverend Tim Jones, who is on a crusade mission to save childhood from mutation.
There’s a toss-up as to what was the stupidest part of the piece. Elaine Griffiths (editor of Prima Baby Magazine) said she objected to the shoes, changed her mind when she saw the black satin ones, and then changed it back to outrage when she saw the leopard-print and hot pink ones? Yes, yes, I get that her point it that those designs are more readily linked to sexuality, and she had some interesting points to make about the fashion industry preying on that childhood urge to mimic adults, but her disapproving tones made it sound like she was going to point out that hot pink and leopard-print were soooo last season. Even worse, Reverend Tim Jones (that’s how he is constantly referred to by Susanna) excelled himself with this exchange:
Susanna: [responding to a point by Elaine that they are just a silly joke] Actually, Reverend Tim Jones, isn’t that the point, that they are just a bit of fun, that babies between 0-6 months don’t develop a view of themselves and their sexuality. They are just going to be dressed in these little shoes, just as they would be in little mini-trainers, they’re never going to be seen, really, outside of the family or friends with them, and it’s, it’s just a joke…
Reverend Tim Jones: Well maybe, I don’t know actually, I’ve been to California, they probably are going to be seen outside the family. Yeah, I’m quite sure that intended as a joke, but it’s the kind of joke where somebody says, you know, “wouldn’t it be funny if we dressed up our children like Julia Roberts out of Pretty Woman“, and that would be a joke to say, “wouldn’t it be funny if…”, but then, we go and do it, and we actually do dress our children up like Julia Roberts out of Pretty Woman, and you know, her character was a prostitute, and, why on earth are we dressing up our children like prostitutes, what does that say?
Well, it says you think women who wear leopard-print high heels are all prostitutes. It also says that I really should be making costumes for babies based on movies. Fancy dress costumes for babies! Hey parents, wouldn’t it be funny if your child looked like various movie characters? Well, now they can! How about Johnny Depp portraying Hunter S. Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, complete with hat, cigarette holder, and jar of ether? Or Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada, with bizarre stylings by Patricia Field and recordings of deferential staff being terrified of imminent firings? Or you could signal your love for The Matrix by dressing your baby as Neo, complete with monk-style black coat, teeny tiny shades, kung-fu training, and a need to rebel against the distortion of our perception of reality by our evil robot overlords? Fun for all the family! Warning, possible psychological warping of baby’s mind may occur.
That quote of course features the contentious statement that California is a state made up entirely of Hypothetical Idiots (Californians reading this blog, could this be true?), but even that doesn’t match his later response to the question from Charlie, who, upon finding out the Reverend Tim Jones has two daughters, asked what he would do if the eldest announced that she wanted to wear miniskirts, to which he replied, “Well, it depends if she’s thirty-five or eight, I suppose.” That’s right, women in your teens, twenties, or early thirties, it’s Burkas for all of you! Only when you get your Adulthood Licence can you show any flesh.
I could be generous and say it was a stupid joke that didn’t come off, but the Reverend seemed very sincere when he said it, and it’s not like the tone of the feature was one of understanding, choosing instead to be based around the fear of what your child is up to, which is their default position, of course. I’m amazed these parents let their children out of the house. Still, it wasn’t all Think Of The Children! agonising. My favourite moment this morning came during an inept feature about festival attendance, with our heroes interviewing R1 DJ Huw Stephens and Rough Guide editor James Smart talking about what kit to take to Glastonbury (wellies, sun cream, etc.). Charlie asked if beards were essential (and I’m not sure he was joking), and Susanna seemed to think that the idea of getting dirty was the worst thing that could happen to a person, reacting with horror at the thought of not washing for a couple of days. Her revulsion was almost endearing, though it reinforces my suspicion that she would be happiest married to the fearsome Don Draper from Mad Men, though without the existential ennui, bird-murdering, and easily-cured shaky hands.
James suggested going to All Tomorrow’s Parties, where she could stay in a chalet, which she thought was a wonderful idea. Me too. Having had a look at this year’s line-up, the thought of the prim and proper Susanna, whose record collection probably contains nothing but Eva Cassidy and Norah Jones albums, standing in perplexed confusion while Animal Collective, Adem, Silver Jews, …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Raekwon the Chef and Ghostface Killah went about their excellent business fills me with utter joy.
Someone get that woman lifetime subscriptions to Wire and Vibe, stat!
ETA: I notice that, considering how Susanna’s presenting style and line of questioning is just the sort of thing the Daily Mail should approve of, they were pretty leering and mean about her presenting at the Oscars earlier this year. I now have to support her against those evil woman-hating Mail bastards, I suppose.
BBC Breakfast Watch! Wii Insults Child Shocker!
I’ve got to stop watching this show. Isn’t the whole idea that it’s supposed to be a mental Valium for people getting up and going to work? Forget it. It’s like a dose of adrenaline to the heart muscle for me. Or having an electrode jammed into my brain like in the amazing season finale of House.
I’m skewing my complaints about it toward the treatment of technology, which goes along the lines of, “Oh teh noes! We don’t understand what this gadget does but it will probably be deadly!” (if this show had its way, we’d all be sitting in swamps eating mud and grunting with animal-like terror every time the moon appears in the sky). As that means I’m also watching them deal with children (because technology will turn our children into cyborgs or corpses of mass-murderers), I’m also judging them on what could be called a Daily Mail Quotient (DMQ), which measures the volume of their terrified screams of, “What about the children? Please, think of the children?!?!?!”. That almost means Marvin Gaye should be judged for his DMQ, but I’ll give him a pass, because, you know, it’s Marvin Gaye, people.
The recent Grand Theft Auto IV panic would get a DMQ score of about 89%, as it posited the end of civilisation if kids kept playing it (which they shouldn’t be anyway). Their total misunderstanding of what texting is, and their worry that it will make all children everywhere forget how to speak the English language got about an 84% DMQ, and probably would have been higher if they hadn’t been shown up by the level-headed fifteen year old in their midst. Funnily enough, the news piece that annoyed me today was covered by the Daily Mail last week; a ten year old girl used a Wii Fit machine belonging to her friends and was referred to as technically obese according to the BMI.
Breakfast had a mother, the daughter in question, and another daughter for no apparent reason, and the Street Doctor, the improbably named Dr. Jonty Heaversedge. It was your standard nonsense, with Bill asking the girl what had happened and terrifying her into silence, Dr. Jonty saying kids shouldn’t be measured according to the BMI, and the mother agreeing with that and being mortified because her daughter (who is obviously not obese or overweight) wanted to go on a diet.
There are a few things about the feature that annoyed me. Firstly, Bill terrorising the young girl by asking how muscular she is. Bad Pervert Bill! Secondly, the possibility that the machine was just broken or calibrated wrong. This seemed so self-evident to me that I was shocked no one brought it up until halfway through the interview, when Bill suggested it might have been knackered. Good Perceptive Bill! Boing Boing came to the same conclusion. Of course, the mother had never considered that and wasn’t there when her daughter got on the machine, so it’s possible her friends messed it and got the set-up wrong, or even worse, manipulated it to make it seem like she was overweight. It’s possible, but no one wanted to consider that, because if that was the case, no one gets to get their Righteous Outrage on, send complaint emails to Nintendo, and get interviewed on TV and by the Daily Mail.
Even if the machine was working correctly, I’m still pissed, as the whole point of this “campaign” seems to be caused more by the fact that the parents had complained to Nintendo, demanding a warning be placed on the game, and Nintendo refused, issuing this statement instead.
Nintendo would like to apologise to any customers offended by the in-game terminology used to classify a player’s current BMI status, as part of the BMI measurement system integrated into Wii Fit.
Wii Fit is still capable of measuring the BMI for people aged between two and 20 but the resulting figures may not be entirely accurate for younger age groups due to varying levels of development.
The fact that it measures kids from the age of two seemed to drive Susannah Reid (subbing for Sian) into paroxysms of outraged disbelief, which amused me. However, Dr. Jonty dissed the use of BMI for kids, as kids change size so often it’s hard to quantify it, and the mother was probably pissed she didn’t get a free Wii for her troubles upset that there wasn’t a warning on the machine saying that the machine might inaccurately judge a child’s weight to be problematic.
Dr. Jonty is right that if we use standard BMI calculations for children we would be silly billies, but BMI for children and teens is calculated differently, and even though it takes into account as many different variables as it can, it must still be used in conjunction with common sense, and the guidance of professional medical expert and parents who spend enough time with their children to know what their dietary habits and daily exercise regimes are like (and by “regimes” I mean as little as running around or using a bike, not pumping iron and running mini-marathons). Also, I don’t own a Wii Fit, and haven’t seen the instruction manuals, but these things are often really exhaustive, as Nintendo know all it takes is one mistake on these things and they will get hit with a million lawsuits. I wonder if the possible inaccuracies of the BMI is mentioned in it. I’ll do some digging, if possible. (Don’t count on it. A knackered ankle has laid me out for the day.)
I understand that telling a child they are obese when they are obviously not might damage the child’s self-image so badly they might develop an eating disorder, but as it is not a function of a child’s internal assessment of what the world considers acceptable (which, it has been argued, can be distorted by exposure to images of size zero models and skinny actresses on TV and in film), surely it’s easily caught. If a responsible parent (who should surely be around when their kids are playing an exercise-intensive game like Wii Fit anyway) notices that their child has been told by a game that they are obese, then they can tell their child this is not the case. And that’s exactly what happened. The young girl was informed by her parents that the machine made a mistake, and Susannah, having questioned her with more tact than Buffalo-Mouth Bill, managed to glean from the girl that she’s fine now and doesn’t consider herself obese or overweight. Have there been more cases of this happening? None that we’ve heard. Crisis probably averted.
There are multiple interesting and crucial debates to be had about children, weight, and self-image to be had, and I’d be crazy to suggest that any of that was trivial, but the paranoia about the Wii Fit is missing the point and confusing people about a machine that will be far more beneficial in the long run than any number of angry letters and outraged newspaper articles. This is the same whenever there is a launch of new hardware or software. People wonder how it will negatively impact on their lives and kick up a stink.
Remember when the Wii came out and everyone broke their living rooms because they weren’t putting the wrist-strap on? Everyone was pissed at the Wii for a fortnight, complaining to Nintendo instead of just putting the strap on (that’s what she said). It’s the same here. New technology arrives that could change the way the world lives, and journalists have been waiting for a reason to demonise it. And here it is. And it’s wrong. The Wii Fit is a good thing, and this one glitch, which might have been caused by any number of things and is easily resolved using common sense, should not overshadow the good that it can do. Try telling that to journalists and the panicky parents they leave in their wake, though.
Anyway, it wasn’t all technophobia this morning. They had Genesis on the show, as BBC Four are wasting a night of programming on the one-time prog heroes turned unadventurous noodlers. That meant they had a particularly aloof Phil Collins in the studio. Quick! Someone tax him before he gets away!
BBC Breakfast Watch! LOL = Laughing All Over
I really don’t want to keep kicking BBC Breakfast whenever it does something stupid, as there aren’t enough hours in the day to catalogue the horror, but when they go after ver yoof ov 2day, I feel compelled to bring it up. This morning the Z-team of Charlie Stayt and Susannah Reid reported on a study from the University of Toronto claiming that, contrary to popular belief (i.e. panicky, ill-thought-out guesswork), teenagers using text speak to communicate with each other are, get this, able to switch back and forth between normal English and the abbreviations they use in texts. I know! Crazy.
To discuss this they brought in the typical opposing viewpoints, a teenager, Lucy Van Amerongen, who has just written The A-Z of Teen Talk, and Marie Clair from the Plain English Society. After an embarrassing animation showing some text speak (containing such mind-bending arcane symbology as “cya 2nite”), Susannah claimed it was like a different language, and then asked Lucy if she started writing like it when not texting. Lucy, who seemed like a normal person and not a drooling imbecile, said that had never happened, pointing out that it’s only used in texting because it’s more efficient. Not to be dissuaded from her “different language” point, Susannah asked if she had to learn a new language, which Lucy pointed out was not necessary. Any abbreviation that got the point across was fine. I can’t believe I’m writing a post about a news show that revealed this fact as if it was revelatory. Do these people live in a commune or something? I know White City is a bit far from civilisation, but it’s not sealed off from the rest of the world.
Plain English Marie then joined in, stating she doesn’t want to be seen as a fuddy-duddy, and then proceeded to say there was a problem with people using text speak in other contexts (Charlie seemed very worried that people would use the word “fink” instead of “think”, poor guy). It was here that my ire rose, because again we were discussing a hypothetical idiot who would be compelled by the march of progress to ignore the English language entirely and revert to symbols and probably grunts to communicate, probably while mugging people with copies of Grand Theft Auto IV. The Hypothetical Idiot is a useful tool when getting into a panic over modernity. “But will this drive the Hypothetical Idiot I just imagined in my head to go crazy hotwiring cars and driving them into crowds of grandparents?” “Will Facebook make some Hypothetical Idiots I just conjured up in my imagination have sex with billions of people?” “Will the Wii make Hypothetical Idiots break nice vases while indulging in silly pastimes that have no educational value not unlike BBC Breakfast?”
If we’re going to worry about what a Hypothetical Idiot might get up to, we might as well stop creating anything or doing anything that might inspire people to potentially harm themselves, providing that person has an IQ of -59. Who needs progress? We can just sit around listening to Test Match Special, drinking weak tea and making polite conversation about the weather. ::breaks object in anger:: Hey, here’s a thought. Let’s not worry about the Hypothetical Idiots, people. They only exist in your fear-encrusted mind! They are merely doing your bidding; you’re the only ones making them jump off buildings after smoking a spliff or drinking Red Bull. Let my hypothetical people go!!!
A quick caveat. I’m sure kids have started to write text speak in exams, and the stories we hear about such things are not apocryphal. It would be crazy of me to think otherwise. I frequent talkbacks on the internet, for god’s sake. I’ve seen spelling errors, grammatical foul-ups, syntactical snafus that would turn Marie Clair’s hair white. The internet can often be a place where language goes to die, and it is shocking. But there are checks and balances in real life, and if people are growing up and still making mistakes like these in situations where they will be judged harshly for it, then there’s a good chance they might have been incompetent anyway. People have had trouble with language before texting came along. It’s not like we were all Kingsley Amis/Margaret Atwood until twelve years ago and now we’re all grunting at each other, burning our dictionaries, and using numbers or letters instead of words (Prince and his fans are exempt from criticism on the last one). Idiocracy is one of my favourite movies of the past few years, but I don’t think it’s coming to pass. People can switch from lazy text speak and back to normal Plain English at will. If I can do it, anyone can.
Of course, none of this mattered to the BBC Breakfast guys. Susannah had already asked Lucy if she slipped into text speak while writing, but asked her again just a minute later, “I mean, Lucy, imagine an exam situation. Can you honestly say you’ve never written any of those abbreviations, or in fact had letters from friends or notes where they’ve started to let these words slip into their normal way of writing?” She was like a dog with a bone. Except stupider.
Sadly Lucy admitted she has used the abbreviation “cuz” instead of “because”, but only in her revision notes (instead of saying, “No, in the imaginary exam you just asked me to create in my head, I didn’t do that. And I got an A+. And then I left school and applied for your job. And got it. And did it better than you”). As a result of that admission all of the adults ganged up on her and started claiming it proved their point and it was a slippery slope and the next step was practically illiteracy. Dear God, it made me so mad.
Charlie won the stupidity trophy, though, by saying to Lucy (who I would, probably rudely, assume to be upper middle class) “you’re very well spoken, and clearly have good use of language, and in a way you’re not part of the problem as you have proved that you can do these two things, but the problem is what happens with other people.” People from a different economic background, perhaps? Lucy looked suitably embarrassed by the whole thing. Marie then compounded the idiocy by proving she knew nothing about text abbreviations by saying LOL stood for Laughing All Over.
After that Susannah interrogated Lucy for a while about how many hours a day she texts (I wish she’d said “ALL DAY LONG AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME OR THE CODE THAT IS USED TO USURP YOUR AUTHORITY!!! LOL!!!!”), and Marie hilariously admitted she abbreviated in texts as well, but used that to prove that she was allowed to because she was a responsible adult who could switch between text speak and Plain English (which was the point of the Canadian study, not to mention what Lucy had been trying to explain earlier). Basically she was convinced, using Hypothetical Idiots as her study group, that young kids would grow up only knowing text speak. The only thing that could stop this, she said, is teaching them a standard version of English that everyone agrees on. A radical idea! I think we should have already been teaching people this universally agreed-upon standard of English all along. I have even invented a name for these places where children can learn this language. I shall call them “schools”.
It was absolute nonsense, yet more of the oldsters panicking because their kids are developing a culture and mode of communication that they cannot possibly understand, thus bringing them closer to oblivion and obsolescence. I can imagine parents must be freaking out that their kids have developed a code that they use to confound authority, and so we hear horror stories about children and teenagers losing the ability to use syllables or words of more than four letters and probably starving as a result, so don’t do it, kids!!! I remember a colleague commenting on how superb Pixar’s Monsters Inc. was as it perfectly captured the fear and ambivalence parents have toward their children (mingled with much stronger love, obviously), either that they would hurt themselves or develop a life of their own, leaving them alone and confused. Well, Charlie and Susannah were Mike and Sully this morning, and Lucy was Boo. Best of all, she totally PWNed the adults. Kudos.
Oh, and if you check out the review of the book I linked to before, skater girl can get bent. She’s obviously just a jellus hata. (And no, I’m not proud of myself for picking on a fifteen-year old.)
Breakfast Of Champions It Ain’t
Consider it flagellation, but we tend to watch BBC’s Breakfast while preparing to head out in the morning. It’s an infuriating show, but there isn’t much else on at that time in the morning. This morning, after nearly bursting into angerflames while watching it, I ended up turning over and catching a customarily piss-poor episode of Smallville (guest-starring Ian Somerhalder), having missed the start of The Naked City on Sky Movies Classic and not feeling up to watching multiple installments of Takeshi’s Castle or Ironside. Even though there is nothing else on, I still debate having it on at all, giving up only because it features London travel news, or as it should be called, “What Percentage Of Your Tube Journey Will Be Cancelled At The Last Minute, Stranding You Underground And Unable to Contact Your Boss To Beg Him Or Her Not To Fire Your Ass For Being Late Every Day?”
Why the hatred? It is just breakfast news, which is never going to be Newsnight, and I’d be a fool to expect anything more than fluffy nonsense and light chatter. What I would expect is at least a baseline level of competence, which we do not get. We only watch about twenty minutes of it on average, and in that small section of the show we always, always, get at least one mis-cued link, one sound error, or one wrong film clip. Oftentimes it’s far worse than that.
I once mentioned this to a colleague of mine, and he immediately leapt to the defence of the show, saying it was no easy thing to make a live TV show, and yes, I’ll grant that, but many live shows either come off without a hitch or with only the occasional error. In a small subsection of the show (which runs for 195 minutes) we get at least one screw up every day. Extrapolate that out to the full length of the show and we’re talking about ten head-in-hands-level mistakes a day at the least. It’s sad and hilarious viewing at the same time.
Those technical difficulties aren’t the worst things about it, though. Not by a longshot. As I said before, I don’t expect Newsnight or Channel Four News, and so it’s churlish to complain about the presenters not being Paxman and Kearney or Snow and Hilsum, but my god, even by the usual standards of early morning TV presenters (in the UK and the US), regular hosts Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams are just appalling. Watching them struggle to comprehend even the most simple of subjects is hard on my teeth, as they tend to grind together every time Bill says something inane, or Sian misunderstands what their guests are trying to say. They’re so bad they make me nostalgic for Dermot Murnagurnah and the fragrant yet icy Kate Silverton. Yes, that bad.
I’ve considered writing something about this godawful show for some time now, momentarily inspired by various car-crash interview gaffes, such as the morning Bill asked Simon Pegg about drinking eggs a grand total of four times, obviously because that was the only bit from the Run, Fatboy, Run trailer that penetrated his braincasing, or yesterday’s debacle when Joanna Lumley tried to get up from her seat in the middle of a link to local news which panicked Bill so much he practically rugby tackled her back down. There are many more examples, but those are the ones that spring to mind.
However, my ire was finally raised to blogging point by a segment about the release of Grand Theft Auto IV which, as expected, was used to say nothing more than, “Video games are destroying civilisation by turning your children into murderers.” I could tell because Bill and Sian’s faces were set not to Puff Piece Perky, but to Serious Story Stern. After a quick nod to the success of the franchise, this little factoid was used as proof of the game’s insidious hold over the nation’s children, as various non-statistics about the violent nature of the game led us into an interview between Team BS and two gamers, one casual, one working for the BBC. Surprisingly the “debate” wasn’t held between the gamers (which is the usual course when news items are discussed in the studio), but between them and Bill and Sian, who pointed out time and time again that games are for kids and are violent and therefore are bad for kids and hence everyone is doomed.
It was already heading downhill by the time the first question was asked, which followed on from an email sent in from someone who thinks GTA IV was “symptomatic of the degenerating society”, and that it allows people to live out a “fantasy of evil,” leading Bill to ask the gamer if he has a fantasy of evil of his own. Sadly the guy didn’t tell him to shut up, instead arguing for the game by saying it allows people to get rid of their pent-up aggression, which led Sian to ask the BBC gamer if that was the same for him, and to add, “I’m not suggesting you’re violent in any way or give in to violent urges.” By then it was obvious the game has been framed as only appealing to people who are drawn to violent things exclusively. Later Bill asked if the game has any redeeming qualities, if the characters give to charity or help people. Seriously, if Bill and Sian were a TV show, they’d be Monarch of the Glen. If they were a book, they’d be The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Where their brain should be, there is merely a tombola, used to raffle off a set of china teapots commemorating the coronation of King George VI.
When it was pointed out by the BBC gamer that GTA IV isn’t on sale to children, Sian batted that away with the argument that kids would want to play it anyway. Of course they do. They’re curious. When I was young I wanted to watch anything that was forbidden, and not even the exciting stuff. I remember staying up to watch some of the Red Triangle films shown on C4 late at night, though sadly the one or two rather earnest European art movies I caught have faded from memory compared to the proper innocence-destroying stuff (early viewings of The Thing, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Videodrome). So what does she suggest? Infantilising ourselves and censoring all art and culture just in case some children stumble across something that might do some harm? (And I emphasise might as there are conflicting reports about the corrupting influence gaming has on young minds.) I say this all the time in real life, and I’m introducing it to the blog now; it’s the 21st Century, you fuckers. KEEP UP!!!
Even for BBC Breakfast, the whole thing was offensively facile. The Beeb gamer tried to draw attention to the huge success of the franchise and how great it was that it was developed by Rockstar Edinburgh, but that was ignored by the presenters who were utterly incapable of seeing the release as anything other than another nail in the coffin of humanity. Another emailer, your archetypal concerned mother, accepted that the game wasn’t for kids, but stated even eighteen year-olds don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with the themes presented by the games (and then said why not celebrate the nice things in life, for crying out loud). Why stop there? Maybe eighteen year-olds don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with anything. Let’s take the vote away from them, stop them joining the army, stop them driving. And what age are you ready to handle any of this? Twenty? Thirty? Life begins at forty, so let’s make that the default age.
It ended with Sian commenting that kids should be playing “that tennis on the computer that just went ‘bip!’ and ‘bip!”. Fine, Sian, if it makes you happy, we’ll throw out years of programming progress just for you. Thanks for contributing nothing to the debate other than to continually turn it around so that game designers and gamers have to prove a negative instead of pundits and panicky parents having to prove games are corrupting on something a little stronger than conjecture and fear of the unknown. Now that you’ve done that, can the adults do what they want now? Please? The despicable Mail bitches that the BBC has a left-wing bias and rails against it every day, but this kind of insulting, alarmist, blinkered, ill-informed, paranoid, Luddite idiocy is just the sort of thing it loves. The Mail and Breakfast should get married and have stunted babies who can’t feed themselves, are terrified of the modern world, and can only talk in racist, homophobic code phrases.
Wow. I feel like Will Graham up in this bitch. In the scheme of things, yes, the shoddiness of Breakfast is nothing to write home about, but this is a subject I get very annoyed about. I guess I should be grateful that they didn’t trot out the “proof” so often used by lazy churnalists that another Rockstar game, Manhunt, warped one kid’s mind so much he murdered his friend, even though he didn’t own it, may have never played it, and any link between the murderer and the game was disputed by the police who investigated and the judge presiding over the case. Instead we got a lot of emotive nonsense about protecting kids from amoral culture intended solely for adult usage, none of which can be considered journalism or news. It’s comment, and poorly thought through as well.
And what came up after that? Talking to Robert Webb and Ella Smith about the current West End run of Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, which could have been the starting point for an interesting debate about size fascism and peer pressure, or even a discussion about what the fuck LaBute’s problem with women is, but instead turned into Sian asking if the play was like Shallow Hal, Bill asking if they keep laughing at all of LaBute’s high-larious jokes while performing, and whether Robert Webb was filming another series of That Mitchell and Webb Thing. I guess it’s good to see their momentary contact with the depravity of gaming hasn’t changed them, if you enjoy cringing, that is.
ETA: Just after I finished this post, I read this article in the Times, telling of a horrible knife attack in Croydon while waiting for the midnight opening of Gamestation. It’s terrible that someone was assaulted in that manner, but the article continues to draw parallels between the game and violence that don’t hold up. The perp obviously has rage issues, but is that because of playing the GTA games? Or was he already like that? There’s no causal link established there, merely a confluence of events, unless the guy suddenly screams, “It was the games wot made me do it!”.
Even more annoying is that some poor guy got mugged yesterday, and his copy of GTA IV was stolen, which is reported in that article as if it is further proof of the corrupting influence of the game. That’s not the fault of the game. It’s a desirable object. Tragically, people get mugged for their desirable objects all the time. Should we ban iPods and mobile phones? No matter how often bad journalists try to link gaming with crime, it just won’t wash. I expect to read more of this nonsense over the next few months.
ETA again: According to Florida attorney Jack Thompson, “Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio.” He also says, “indictments should be handed down against Wal-Mart, Best Buy, GameStop, and all other retailers distributing this game to minors at their retail stores, openly, to kids who are only seventeen.” Of course. They would be breaking the law, after all. However, he also says, “indictment should also be against Sony and Microsoft which are making this pornographic game available to minors, and openly so, on their PS3 and Xbox systems.” What, just for making the game and making machines to play the game on? This argument only works if you assume games consoles are exclusively used by kids who are not legally being sold the game. Gamers are not just kids, you cretin. Now go find something important to rail against instead of playing to the worst instincts of the voter. Oh God, I’m getting this annoyed about it all and I don’t even like the GTA games. I realise that they’re great, but I’ve never spent enough time with them to get as obsessed as millions of other people have. I need to move on before I really do burst into flame.
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
