Podcasting Too

The internet is great for doing quite a few things.  It’s very good for social media, where you can like pictures of kittens, or retweet angry and ill-informed comments originating from GRU bots, for fun.  It allows you to order your shopping to get delivered to you, or to research stuff like string theory or episode summaries of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Best of all, it allows you to reach out and share your opinions with others, secure in the knowledge that your views are important and will be embraced and appreciated by others, especially if you turn comments to ‘off’ so you never have to read any negative criticism, or indeed any criticism at all, of your forthright views about the casting of a woman as a female Doctor Who, or your controversial views about race and intelligence.

On the up side, for every bigot there are hundreds of passionate and positive people who want to share their knowledge, or even just their experience, about something dear to them.  Or just want to try to entertain.  And for each of these people who knock out a podcast, there are many more who engage in a positive way.

Podcasting is something special.  Technology has developed smartphones that mean we can download podcasts and take them with us, meaning that we can listen to podcasts at home, or on the move.

But the really special thing about podcasts is that the podcasts created by enthusiasts are better than the podcasts produced by professional broadcasters.

This doesn’t happen anywhere else.  A blog is very unlikely to be as good as, say, a novel or a published collection of essays from the ‘New Yorker’, because a blogger is unlikely to have the resources available to a remunerated writer, like an editor.  There are exceptions but the dross to quality ratio is high.  Likewise vlogs.  These only really succeed where they cover niche subjects and have a charismatic host.

Bringing us to podcasting.

The beauty of a podcast is that it can be high concept with a low budget, and a real labour of love.  Do you like Jane Austen?  So do I.  Do I want to hear you talk about Jane Austen for two hours?  Probably not, but I bet you can talk about her life, her literature, adaptations and legacy in fifteen minute chunks for a few episodes?  How about getting your friends involved?  How about asking listeners to contribute.  Holy shit, as Jane Austen never wrote, ‘Talkin’ Bonnets’ is number five in the podcast download charts.

The enthusiast is able to outperform the professional broadcaster for the very same reasons the blogger cannot.  They don’t have an editor and they don’t have to worry about producing to deadline to get paid.  They can craft a labour of love.  They can also interact with their community.

I love a literary podcast, two presenters knocking views about their favourite stories back and forth, it’s almost what the media was invented for.  Because while there is nothing quite like a single voice speaking directly to you, eavesdropping on a conversation is tremendous fun too.

They also provide the perfect platform for original drama.  Anyone with a bit of writing talent and some actor friends who are keen to perform, and are there any other kind of actor friends? can create an episodic drama that builds and audience and a reputation.  This is the stuff that would never have been produced by a broadcaster with a finite amount of airtime.

And of course there are the documentary podcasters.

While genre fiction may have found a more mainstream audience thanks to the Game of Thrones TV series and the MCU, podcasts are, to an extent, the fanzines of the twenty first century, produced with love by people who care about the subject for an audience who are consuming this stuff because they have a passion for it and, rather pleasingly, come to it by way of subscription, just like back in the day.

Maybe somebody should make a documentary podcast about fanzines.  Most likely, somebody already has.  So what about a drama about a fanzine, a fanzine about Jane Austen.  Now that, I’d subscribe to.

Moron TV The Apprentice

Last Wednesday I watched the first two minutes of the first programme in the latest series of ‘The Apprentice’.  This was a mistake.  In more ways than one.  A mistake because I had no desire to watch the first two minutes of ‘The Apprentice’, and a mistake because having recklessly watched the first two minutes of ‘The Apprentice’, I really wish I had not.

Full disclosure, it was my own fault.  I wasn’t quick enough getting out of the room.  Normally, when the titles roll it’s the que for all right thinking men to go to the kitchen and load the dishwasher to the soothing strains of Radio 5 Live.

And that theme music, ‘The Apprentice Dirge’ needs to go.  Surely the music that used to play over the end credits of ‘The Benny Hill Show’ would make an excellent intro. 

Initially when I watched last Wednesday, I was confused.  Surely this was not a new series but some kind of recap?

All the candidates from the previous series were there.  The Lurker, The Gobby Barrow Boy, The Gobby Bird, The Ice Queen, The Geek, The Village Idiot, The Dandy (cravat), The Closeted Homosexualist, The Older Woman, Hair Gel Guy and, God help us, Ladies’ Man.

The first episode is, traditionally, where the BBC show snippets of the showreel the candidate submitted.  This is not a bloke recreating the magic of pre-internet late night Open University telly by standing in front of a chart and pointing out his sales figures.  This is where you have to stand out, and the place that, apparently, gave birth to the phrase ‘I am the Beyoncé of business’.  Interesting in itself because, given her global brand, I thought Beyoncé was the Beyoncé of business.  In fact I just Googled ‘Beyoncé’ to check the spelling, well, almost, I actually Googled ‘Beyonce’.  The second autosuggestion was ‘Beyonce net worth’.  And that’s with Safesearch off.

Since that proclamation the only way to go, in true ‘The Apprentice’ style, is bigger and ‘better’ or, at least, more absurd.  That’s why we can expect emulation in exclamation by the name-checking of other celebrities although, this being ‘the Apprectice’, we can expect the choice of celeb to be a little off, causing that helper of Sugar’s who looks like Barbies Bitter Gran to wrinkle her nose like a Bad Tabitha.

Given the calibre of candidate, it’s unlikely that they will go for a historical or even fictional reference which is a shame.  And by their very nature a material bunch is unlikely to compare themselves to a deity, even a safe one that’s been played by a British actor in a Hollywood film.  So while we may expect ‘I am the Harvey Weinerstiener of business’, it’s unlikely that we’ll get ‘I am the Stalin of business’, ‘I am the Lawrence of Arabia of business’ or ‘I am the Zeus of business’.

These are three statements that one is unlikely to hear because, while hair gel density may change, the thickness of candidates does not.

‘The Apprentice’ goes beyond being Moron TV, although with candidates about as clued up as something that has crossed over from the Farie Realm, or a box, ‘The Apprentice’ actually makes it into the category of oxyMoron TV, because the candidates are presumably smart enough to dress themselves, apply grooming products if nothing, generally it would appear that none of them, or at least very few, have actually taken the time to watch a few box sets of previous programmes and determine how the whole thing works.

Things not going my way, I’ll throw a temper tantrum in the boardroom and tell Lord Sugar I’ll give him 120%.  He may wonder how somebody with such a shit grasp of maths can aspire to run a business and he’ll surely give me another chance.

Fuck!  How did that not work?

Positives?  I rather like the way that the producers have obviously denied the candidates access to the internet, meaning that they have to rely on books and their own wits.  No wonder they are so fucking helpless in tasks.

God knows it’s difficult to succeed in business.  This is presumably especially true if you are an idiot.

Moron TV, Don't Tell the Bride

Overpopulation may be a thing, or it may not.  It’s probably a thing if you have access to graph paper, some pens, a few stats about birth rates and a nagging sense that there are a hell of a lot more annoying young people about the place than there used to be, many of them on scooters.

It’s probably not a thing if your job involves the maintenance of the lamp at the top of your tall, thin, circular and often fog-bound place of work.

Controlling overpopulation can be done in a number of ways.  Global conflict is a good short term fix, but booms of the explosive kind can be followed by booms of the baby kind.

There is a school of thought that if you can’t stop population growth, then you can at least try and nudge population development.  In short, if people are going to breed, then an effort should be made to ensure that the result is of benefit to the human race.  The problem with this is that eugenics and selective breeding is most usually either the preserve of madmen (it’s always men) or the landed classes, who want to keep property, wealth, power or a particular genetic defect, such as a weak chin, in the family.

Certainly in these enlightened times one would never consider trying to dissuade or prevent anyone from pairing, and starting a family with, anyone of their choosing, no matter how shocking the people in question might be.

But what else could explain ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’?

DTTB is genuine weep-for-future-of-humanity teevee.

Essentially the format is that a bloke is given all the money and all the responsibility of arranging his wedding.

Exactly.

This includes choosing the wedding dress.  If you go into any menswear shop you will witness men asking their wife or girlfriend if what they are trying on is suitable.  Men cannot even be trusted to choose their own pants, so what fucking chance of they got picking out a wedding dress?

One of the worst contrivances of DTTB is that the bride always appears to have a really clear idea of what they want their wedding to be like.  And the bloke, who presumably has spent time with, and possibly even discussed wedding plans with, the lady in question, always does something completely unrelated.

Her:  ‘I’ve always dreamed of a classic wedding, white dress, classic car, church.’

Him:  ‘I fucking love Battlestar Galactica.  Not the remake, the original series, so it’s going to be a Battlestar Galactica themed wedding.  I’ve spent three grand on tinfoil already.  It’s going to be lush’.

Other highlights include the traditional bloke organising a hen do, comprising of a bottle of Lambrini and a VHS box-set of ‘Sex and the City’ to be watched at the bride’s mum’s house, while the groom has a weekend in Vegas, or similar.

All of this, surely, is intended to stop people like this breeding, the intention being that any bride-to-be confronted with the prospect of a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe themed wedding and a groom who still has stripper glitter behind his ears will want to go to her room and cry for so long she is no longer of child-bearing age, while the bloke in question is, thanks to the magic of media, revealed to womankind to be not the sort to be trusted with a white frock and some fruit cake, never mind a family.

Given the lack of imagination, coupled with the love of a format-flogging-franchise that exists in tellyland, I await the arrival of ‘Don’t Tell the Corpse’ to the schedules, where some clueless family member is given seventeen grand to arrange the send off of a loved one.  If it runs true to form, then the gorm-bereft idiot with the loot will blow it all on the wake for him and his mates, leaving the rest of the family to knock up a coffin from cereal packets and pinch any floral arrangements from the local allotments, where a mysterious six foot deep hole has also recently appeared.  Hard to tell what will result from such a show first, ASBO or BAFTA.

The verdict

How the fuck can Oscar Pestorious not be guilty?
In cases like this, when you think 'He did it, he's fucking going down' and so on, when the verdict, normally of a jury, is given, you think to yourself, well, that's a surprise, but I guess they were there throughout the whole trial, whereas I just saw what got reported, and was trying to judge the body language of guilt based on some, frankly appalling, pastel sketches of the accused.
Not so here.  The South Africans may be recovering racists but when it comes to courtroom drama they are very progressive, meaning they allow the cameras in the courtroom.  Presumably the next move is to have live action commentary.
What it means is that a combination of available footage, celebrity and morbid curiosity led to large swathes of the trial being broadcast on the BBC news channel, because apparently it's news to broadcast hours of some weepy bloke bleating about how he didn't mean to shoot his girlfriend and ruin his en suite.
Any bloke listening realised that these were the honest emotions of a man who really, really, did not want to go to jail.  Any woman listening recognised the sort of sincerity normally associated with the phrase 'It's not you, it's me' prior to a rapid alteration in relationship status.
So normally, we're not in a position to fairly judge others.  Thanks to telly, we were.

Who's been sitting in my seat?

I bet Portillo doesn't have to put up with this!

In possibly the greatest rehabilitation of a personality since Paul went from tax collector to apostle, Michael Portillo is now better known as a presenter of charmingly inoffensive soufflé-weight documentaries about train travel than as The Hammer Of The Poor.  Essentially, the format of ‘Trains to Charming Places’ is that Michael, sporting a wardrobe that makes one question his sexuality and clutching a guide book as outdated as the ideas he had when in the Cabinet, takes trains hither and yon and stops off to discuss heritage trades like being a farrier, fletcher or cooper (back when these were trades and not merely surnames.  Presumably following the tradition of names deriving from trades, a century hence Tommy Callcentre and Susie Barista will be common enough names) before announcing ‘look at my bright trousers and tremble’ and ambling off towards the station.

Anyone watching this programme for longer than the necessary time (which is the length of time it takes to press the button on the remote to take you to the next channel) will note that when the presenter makes his train journey, he is inevitably in a not terribly crowded carriage.  This of course makes perfect sense as crouching across from the presenter is a cameraman, sound guy, director and the girl who fetches the paninis.

Anyone who commutes on a regular basis will know that such space is far from the norm, but then again the programme probably wouldn’t have the same relaxed air if Michael were standing in a vestibule (loom it up, it’s the right word) between carriages with his nose rubbing the camera lens, thanks to the overcrowding.

Neither does Michael apparently have to find his won seat by excavating a pile of used Metros and the debris of what appears to be a takeaway Medieval banquet.

Naturally, railway companies have to make huge profits somehow, and the latest trend appears to be charging ridiculous ticket prices and only employing cleaners every third day.  This means that you usually have the opportunity to play the Goldilocks Game when alighting, in other words ‘which anti-social fucker has been sitting in my seat’.  If you are lucky, it’s somebody who has carefully refolded their copy of the Metro before dropping it on the floor, if you are unlucky, it is somebody who has either breakfasted on the flakiest pastry ever made, or is a leper.

Occasionally though it’s just a single coffee cup.

What, Watson, can we deduce from this.  Firstly, that the drinker favours decaf, as their coffee has obviously not given them the energy required to bin the fucking thing.  Secondly, that there are either an oligarch or a fare dodger, as it is unlikely that anyone purchasing a ticket at today’s prices can also afford store-bought coffee.  Finally, that they have joined the growing tribe of adult litterlouts (yes, leaving a coffee cup for somebody else to clear away, when you actually have to walk past a bin in the carriage to exit, is littering).

Cardboard coffee cups are the new fag butts and as such are the very worst and most offensive sort of litter because coffee, like fags, is a product consumed by adults.  Crisp packets and sweetie wrappers are annoying litter but one can almost understand why Little Fuckers, sorry, why children, discard them, it’s because they are careless, have not been brought up properly and have never spent a Sunday morning tidying their front garden by plucking Haribo wrappers out of their hedges.

Commuting, I think, makes one more intolerant of stupidity, be it passive aggressive littering, leaky headphones or the inappropriate use of the mobile ‘phone in any carriage, actually, on any train I am in or on or even waiting for.

Which is why it would make for a magnificent conclusion to the series to see Portillo completely lose his fucking mind with an annoying fellow traveller who has their shitty music on too loud and beat the little prick to death with his Bradshaw.

Now that I would watch.

Workplace of heroes

‘Netflix’ is astonishing.  Looking at the billboards across town advertising the US remake of ‘House of Cards’ you would think that Netflix is all about original (or nearly original) high-quality programming.  And it is, the US remake of ‘House of cards’ is so glossy that if it were a magazine, the ads would be so incredibly discreet that you would be left wondering if they were for mineral water of watches.  Of course, Netflix has no ads, just a monthly subscription charge.  And one of the selling points of ‘House of cards’ was that all episodes for a season were released on-line in one go.

Because original programming aside, Netfix is actually all about the binge watching.

How to describe Netflix?  Simple.  It’s like somebody driving a warehouse of box sets up to your front door.

It’s a binge bonanza and ideally suited to those with no real discipline (‘OK, just one more episode before bed’) and real patience (‘OK, apparently it only starts getting good half way through season two, but you have to watch the whole first season to really appreciate it’) and real time to indulge, or a real ability to ignore a very real need to do anything that involves going outside.

It also allows you to rediscover shows that you stopped watching because either they were on too late or you just missed them or because, at the time, you thought they were a bit shit.  Because thanks to the internet many a cancelled show has been reappraised and it turns out there wasn’t a problem with the show, but rather it was those jerks at the network who didn’t give it enough of a chance, or kept moving the timeslot and killed it off.  Also, since you’re paying for it anyway, you may as well give it a try, because the internet says I should like it and the internet is hardly ever wrong about cultural stuff.

The odd thing is, you’re more likely to dip back into something you stopped watching than you are to start watching something new.  It’s telly, it’s nostalgia, it’s instant, it’s more fun than jet-washing the patio, what more do you want?

It also let’s you determine consistent themes that appear across different shows.

A few years ago, there used to be a programme on teevee called ‘Reaper’.  It was about a seemingly ordinary bloke who worked at a huge DIY store called the ‘Work Bench’ but who turned out to be a bounty hunter for Satan, with responsibility not just for flogging automatic toilet roll dispensers or whatever, but also for dragging escaped souls back to Hell.

Then there was ‘Chuck’.  Chuck worked in an enormous electrical store called the ‘Buy More’.  Chuck wasn’t just a guy who could sell you a digital toilet roll dispenser or whatever, he was also the unwilling repository of ‘the intersect’, which sees all of the American government’s most secret secrets implanted in his head, yadda yadda yadda.

Obviously, there’s a format here.  If you want to cast an unlikely hero in an everyman occupation, it needs to be something that requires him to wear and apron and a name tag.  Buy not a hair net, as fry guy at maccydees was obviously an invitation to litigation, and so peon at huge store was the occupation of choice.

That much makes sense, as it would explain why there is never anybody around in the fucking timber section at my local DIYosausous to help you out when you need something cut to size, that size being short enough to fit lengthwise in your car so that you don’t have to transport a fencepost home vertically, which can result in your driving under some low electric cables and transforming your car into an enormous, impromptu, spontaneous dodgem, or under a bridge, transforming it into an impromptu convertible.

So far, so sustainable.  What doesn’t ring true is that in both cases, insanely hot, but also charming, women work with our heroes.  In the Reaper’s case, in the store and in Chuck’s case, at the sausage shack next door, in the same retail park.

Now, I am the last person to make personal comments about the sort of people who work at B&Q/Homebase/Retail Park ‘Restaurants’, but if pressed, I’d remark that in terms of looks I think you’re less likely to think ‘hottie’ and more likely to think ‘somewhere, there’s a bridge unattended with goats just skipping on over it’.

‘Reaper’ actually makes quite a decent fist of locating their extraordinary Joe in such a mundane location and to be honest, the lovable misfits goofing around in the store is a lot more enjoyable than the segments when he is forced to do battle with budget CGI effects.  ‘Chuck’ is more of a straightforward spy thriller but you get the sense that the fan base for both of these shows were the sort of men who have a job involving a name badge.  No doubt knowledge of this demographic emerging had something to do with no season three onwards being available for either series.

Daytime telly

Daytime television is special.

Back in the day, when television was steam powered and ‘pages from Ceefax’ actually appeared in the TV listings as late night programming (given the choice of that or ‘Babestation’, I know what I’d rather watch), daytime television required careful programming.  There were only so many channels and you had to programme for a specific audience, which included children.  That’s why you had awesome kids telly, made by stoners for stoners or by ridiculously gifted artists who were masters of stop motion and with a few bits of card, some crayons, limitless talent and, yes, a shed, produced shows that induce an element of nostalgia so profound in adults of a certain age that there is talk of adding it to the periodic table.

There have been two major changes to daytime television.

The first was the forced resettlement of all children’s programming to their dedicated digital channels, meaning that BBC1 for instance is no longer home to ‘Blue Peter’, the sort of statement that, for some of us, has a ‘ravens leaving the Tower of London’ level of profundity about it.  However, it’s a move that makes perfect sense and not even the most nylon jumper wearing, monster munch eating, chopper riding, developmentally arrested adult would argue that, because those very same adults must remember occasionally tuning in to get their lunchtime fix of Play School only to be confronted with some bald old man in an ill fitting suit spouting Bolshevik nonsense, because back in the day, kids tee vee was regularly bumped so that the BBC could show live and uninterrupted footage of the TUC conference, or the conference of some sort of political party.  It was like the red button for badly dressed adults wanting to spout crap and foam at the mouth – never mind the plight of the workers, where’s Ivor the Engine you bastards?

The second development is the proliferation of digital channels meaning that these need filling.  This means resorting to imports, usually American.  Of all the channels, the most promising and ultimately the most disappointing has to be E4 which, during the day, promises back to back sitcoms.  The reality is somewhat different.  Regular viewing will in fact reveal that the programmers for E4 appear to have obtained their imported sitcoms not in a deal hammered out in the slick boardrooms of New York, but as a result of purchasing a VHS box set in a charity shop.  This is the only explanation for the channel airing seemingly random episodes of a series, and mixing up the seasons when they show double bills of a sitcom.  This is, however, kind of fun, and an insight into what it must be like to be a time traveller, because you get to see the actors as they were a few years ago, and then recently.  Long story short – we all get fat.

The worst thing about daytime television has to be the adverts.  These are targeted at the audience most likely to be watching at the time and so the adverts are, well, they’re, well…  Put it this way, you know how you get KFC, and then you get those wannabe chicken joints, like ‘Tennessee Fried Chicken’, because the guys who run it couldn’t pass the KFC franchise entrance exam or something?  Well, adverts on daytime telly are a lot like that.  So you get adverts for things not available in the shops.  For a reason.

As a nation, we are supposed to be turning to timeslip television, where we pick the best shows, and ones about gypsies, and watch them when we want, without wading through the endless dross out there to get to them. 

Daytime television turns that premise on its head, you can turn it on and just leave it running.  The sitcoms are so samey that the only way you can tell what season it is is the BMI of the leading lady and the ads are trite to the point of dreadful, but it does exert a soporific effect, weakening ones resolve to reach for the off-switch and a decent hardback in that order.

It makes one look forward to the TUC conference.