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.

X Rated

The arrival of a teevee box set on iTunes is always something to be celebrated.  For five quid, you can have days of entertainment, the sort that requires you to lie motionless on the couch only moving occasionally to visit the kitchen to forage for sustaining snacks.  This is the sort of activity that lends itself more to the sporting of pyjamas in the daytime and DVT stockings rather than athletic wear, or proper clothes.  Essentially, it's a return to the halcyon days when Test Match Special was on the proper telly.

Of course, unless it is made with the confidence of late night shopping, no entrainment purchase is made without at least some internal debate which, with the advent of streaming services, has become somewhat fraught.  Do you buy now, or do you wait until it's even cheaper, and what if it doesn't get even cheaper, but what if it appears for free on Netflix, but what if it vanishes from Netflix unexpectedly before you have finished watching it?

Suggested solution is purchase the damn thing and live with the self loathing.

At least one no longer has to factor pirate streaming services into the consideration.  Once a swashbuckling way to thumb your nose at the faceless monolithic entertainment corporations who produced your favourite shows but always, always, were worthy of your contempt because they would one day cancel a beloved show or, worse, allow it to continue when it was plainly past it's best, experiencing a sort of series senility, pirate streaming sites allowed one to enjoy postcard sized low-res episodes of your favourite shows with the added bonus of Korean subtitles.  Today, they are a gateway to more viruses than a hooker's wet wipe and best avoided unless you have a computer you can put in quarantine.

If you believe the media, you would think that box sets were a recently recent invention.  And they are, for mainstream telly.  However, any geek will tell you that genre television has known and embraced the box set for many, many years.  I recall visiting homes where the bookcases would be home to Buffy box sets.  I didn't criticise, as my own bookcases contained VHS box sets of The X Files.  This was like Buffy but crucially was for adults, and had a much fitter female lead.

The thing about box sets is that they require effort to watch.  This is not another blog entry about how modern technology has ruined it for everyone and kids today don't have an appreciation of how the arts should be enjoyed, but anyone watching telly on their iPad on a train should be flogged.  How are you supposed to enjoy plot, pace, tension and characterisation with station announcements every three minutes and the screen reflecting  everything going on around you.  It's not just vampires that sunlight is harmful to, it's atmospheric lighting on set too.

Box sets require investment.  The best reason to purchase one is to binge, to exhibit your mastery over the schedules and to pull up from that cliffhanger.

Geeks have time.  That's why Buffy and the X Files were so popular on VHS back in the day.  It's probably also why Ally McBeal box sets were so popular.  These too were watched by people in pyjamas, it's just that these people were women.

There will be people who are now considering the purchase of box sets online that they previously owned on VHS and also possibly on DVD.  The's an argument that these people should be able to download for free and that anyone who went the VHS/DVD/BluRay route should get a free download and a refund.  Seriously, if this is the fourth format you are going to buy in, you have to be wondering whether it's worth skipping downloads and waiting for the next iteration of box set.

I had a few series of the X Files on VHS, purchased at huge expense and thrown out a few years ago, as charity shops no longer accept VHS tapes as donations.

So, obviously, now is the time to replace those box sets, clear the schedules, launder the pyjamas and prepare for hundreds of hours of broadcasting excellence, all the while marvelling at how young Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny look in series one.

Typewriter 2.0

I am once again in a hotel, and I am once again thinking about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.

It’s a rather pleasant hotel.  It’s in the centre of London, with a view out over the docks to the city (and there is almost everything you need to know about London, if you wrote that on the back of a postcard from the past anywhere else in the world, you would have the mental image of a place of transit smelling of desperation and mackerel, populated by wanton types with earrings, and that’s just the sailors.  The only boats bobbing in the dock here are Sunseekers and the city is the City, proud to leave all the lights on in their huge office blocks to create the impression that everyone is still hard at it after dark, shouting into telephones, Like In The Movies).

The air conditioning is hidden and efficient, there is no lazily rotating ceiling fan that can cross fade to become the rotating blades of a helicopter.  Maybe it’s stealth?

Nevertheless, there’s something about being in a hotel and not being on holiday that makes me think about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.  I’d like to say it’s the mutual incompatibility of pool toys and AK47s that make any holiday hotel a haven, but sadly that’s no longer true.

So on the strength of my previous post about ambient soundtracks, I should probably be putting together the faux war correspondent soundtrack, era by era.  Let’s start with the 1970s.  Busy traffic, foreign murmuring, farting scooters, the occasional mooing of an ox, the whup whup whup of a Huey passing overhead and the clackity clack (‘don’t talk back!’) of the typewriter.

Vietnam was, I have read, the first televised war.

There have been plenty since.  I remember ITV reporting Afghanistan.  Film reports of Sandy Gall sitting in a cave somewhere in Afgan, breaking (unleavened) bread with the Taliban, who were off to beat back the Russians. 

And of course the Falklands.  ‘I counted them all out, I counted them all back’.  A Union Flag waving from the top of an aerial as a squaddie yomped to Port Stanley and Victory.

Gulf War I and Gulf War II.  Gulf War I was night vision cameras on tanks streaking across the desert.  Gulf War II took things to the next level, that next level being vertical as we were treated to footage of the nosecone cam of a bunker buster.  Not to mention the ‘shock and awe-shit there goes that little place that does great falafel’ of the opening night bombardment.

Gulf War II was the last television war.  Now, conflict plays out on snapchat and Twitter, barbarism on Youtube.

What the medium of the next Big One will be I’m not sure.  Possibly when the nukes start flying, the next war will be recorded by the cave paintings of the survivors but actually I think a more realistic prospect will be that the next major conflict will be reported by ABC when it’s a throw down between the Red and the Blue, rather than the Grey and the Blue.  I think Blue won last time?

Vietnam was certainly a reporters’ war.  It also produced memoirs and collections of reportage and, of course, a load of great movies (although the greatest war movie ever made is ‘Where Eagles Dare’, followed by ‘The Eagle Has Landed”, followed by ‘Heartbreak Ridge’.  Basically, if it has ‘Eagle or Clint, it’s all good).

As previously reported from the front line in Salisbury, I’m pretty sure that my ancient Powerbook could stop a .303 round that would take down a Decepticon, but I would rather like it if the keyboard sounds could be set to different themes.  Obviously ‘space’ and ‘rainforest’ or similar would be popular, but I’m attracted to the idea of ‘quill’ and, of course ‘Imperial typewriter’.

For the (written) record, I once owned an electric typewriter, a Brother, once plugged in and placed upon a table, typing generated a report like a fucking artillery barrage.  Hardly the sort of thing to write tender love poetry upon, that ladies could then read, and frot themselves senseless to.

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.

Eurovision 2014

Every year so fresh, every year a new and exciting opportunity to hear ‘bingly-bingly bong’ expressed in a variety of languages.  Every year more opportunity than last year to hear a new language as, things in Europe being what they are, formally happy countries are becoming new, bloody miserable, countries with their own currency, national costume (the flared pantaloon) and language (just like last year’s national language, but with a lot more gargling at the back of the throat).

In a changing world, it’s quite lovely that there are some constants.

Such as the many stock components to Eurovision, without which, it wouldn’t be Eurovision. 

There is the host venue for instance.  It used to be that the competition would be hosted in a prestigious established national musical venue, but that’s before all those Eastern European countries that are intolerant of gays started winning, and so now the venue is likely to be a former industrial site, like a cement factory, abattoir, or prostitute training school, so all the homosexualists the event attracts are already outside the city walls by sunset anyway and nobody has to fret about their goat being fucked by anybody outside the family.  Whatever the venue, some neon and dry ice and it looks exactly like where they film the ‘X Factor’, which I think is a suburb of Hell.

There are the hosts.  Anyone from a foreign country who can speak English reasonably well has either become a banker in London, married a footballer, become an action hero in Hollywood or is working hard on their second Michelin star by doing interesting things with goats.  That’s why the people left hosting the programme sound like their day job is dubbing porn, and look like the only job they could get in porn is dubbing.

There are the acts. 

There are four types. 

The first is, essentially, ethnic Euro.  This is ooompah to a disco beat and it’s only half way through ‘Ein Jolt’ (‘My Goat’) that you realise that this not irony, but a representation of the cultural output of a country that, by the twisted rules of broadcasting, considers itself to be ‘European’. 

The second is the type that has a pleasingly bingly-bongy tune, a bloke singing, and either backing singers or dancers that make the males in the home audience go very quiet. 

The third is the trier.  Typically a ballad, this will normally be a woman in a floaty dress, normally in a lot of dry ice, occasionally with a bloke on a stool in the background strumming a guitar or, if they followed the last act, himself.

Finally there’s the novelty act.  Trampolines can be a feature of this, as can national costume (anywhere East of Paris and national costume is all the same, pantaloons and a hat).  This is the winning act.

There is the definition of ‘European’.  Hello, is that the Kremlin?  Yes, well, according to Eurovision you are part of Europe, and hence part of a larger whole, ruled from Britain (with some help from Germany), so start behaving like a proper European, that is, don’t invade countries, but do by all means buy as much of their goat’s cheese as possible.

There is the Eurovision viewer.  There are two types.  The sort that watch the entire show, possibly making a party of it, either by having an actual party with friends in costume and so on, or by adopting the much more sensible measure of sitting there with a telly, a wine box and a smart ‘phone and txting their thoughts to their friends, all the while occasionally flicking up the channels to that ‘Morse’ they can’t recall if they have seen or not.  Then they get a bit intense and bitter when the voting starts and the camera shows the various camps backstage and the British entry starts the evening bubbly and ends blubbing.

Or the politician.  Miss the acts, sit down in front of the telly for the voting, and probably get a greater understanding European politics than you will from any number of newspaper pundits.

And of course, next year, the possibility of a Scottish entry, with bagpipes.  So, Eurovision 2016 from Leith?

What the hell...is 'water cooler television'?

Micro docs (not, as the phrase might imply, a reference to the number of health care professionals likely to be left working in the NHS after Capita get a hold of the health service, nor dwarf GPs, but an entirely new concept in educating the attentionally spanned impoverished and the subject of last Saturday’s blog post) are, possibly, a breakthrough in water-cooler friendly television. 
Whatever that is.
Ten minutes on the internet turns up LOADS of porn, but also that ‘water cooler television is an outdated cultural reference to television that people talk about when they gather around the water cooler, rather than television featuring water coolers nor television programming for water coolers.  Although, if you want the sort of people who spend a lot of time hanging around the water cooler discussing your programming, then lots of programmes about water coolers, including a soap set in the room or corner of the office where the water cooler is located, is not a bad idea and, for those who are really frequent visitors to the water cooler, a sister channel about toilets.
Thinking about it for a couple of seconds, which is a couple of seconds too long, who the fuck wants water cooler loiterers talking about their programmes anyway?  If your aspiration is to have your body of work watched and then criticised by the sort of people who use hydration as an excuse to hang around a large bottle of H2O in the hope the pretty girl on work experience has to come by to change the paper in the bottom draw of the nearby photocopier (because you arrived early to empty the tray to engineer such a visit), then aim higher. 
What does success look like? 
It looks like a BAFTA award.
But also, well, on a commercial channel it looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing whatever crap was advertised during the commercial breaks in your programme.  In other words, 50 Malibu Barbie’s arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered them, delivered by a man who is already thinking ‘peado’. 
On the BBC, success looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing the same jacket your lead character was wearing in a crucial scene after visiting the sort of web site that gives that sort of information.  In other words, a North Face parka arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered it, in July, but, as it’s a North face parka, is really pleased and practically has to wrestle it away from delivery guy.
Fuck the water cooler tribe, they don’t even pay for their drink, we want the pub people.
So, what do people talk about down the pub.  Teevee obviously and, because the pub is the parliament of the people and hence a place where you want to always appear smarter than everyone else, you talk about the documentary you saw last night on some diverting subject, rather than the afternoon you spent watching back-to-back Ballamorys in your pants working your way through a Pot Noodle three for the price of two pack you bought on a whim that was supposed to last you a month.
Hence the need for micro docs.  You can’t get cooler telly.

Micro Docs

Documentaries.  Here’s the thing…who’s got an hour to invest in a, no doubt worthy, show about Jupiter’s moons, French caves or weird foreign shit when all you really need is the bit that makes you almost summon your wife from doing the washing-up to ‘see this shit!’?
And let’s be clear about what constitutes a documentary.  A programme about nature, the planet, other planets, how hard life was back when things were black and white and anything to do with caves are fine.  War documentaries are OK, but only if the subject of that documentary is anything other than Hitler Was Bad.  Any series featuring a profession and a recurring character is not. a.  fucking.  documentary.
In short, you want to 1: Reveal astonishing fact about bees/Jupiter/Clouds.  2: Have somebody snort ‘No fucking way’ when you tell them about it down the pub.  3: state ‘it’s true’.  Follow up fact, slam dunk and mine’s a pint of Large and a packet of pork scratching please Neville.
The thing about documentary makers is that they spend a looooooooooong time, and suffer quite a bit of discomfort, making their programme.  If it’s a nature documentary, it’s all about sitting freezing your ass off on a remote hillside trying to get a picture of an animal that, let’s face it, probably doesn’t even taste good so why is it so rare anyway? before trekking seventeen hours to the nearest village with an internet café, firing up something with a Pentium 486 and finding out, through a heavily censored Facebook, that your girlfriend has updated her status not to ‘single’ which you were worried about during this period of separation, but ‘married’, to a bloke that looks a lot like your brother.  Then, once you have your hundreds of hours of footage, you have to sit alone in a dark room for weeks in order to edit it down to a manageable 60 minutes, which these days includes ten minutes of ‘how we made this’.  By the way, that shot of you having a breakdown in that internet café in Nepal…BAFTA love shit like that.
The solution; micro-docs.  If John Lewis can, as they did last Christmas, essentially put together an advert that in 30 seconds had the same emotional effect on the weak-minded as other seasonal animated offerings (Snowman and Snowdog excepted, they are still the supreme Christmas offerings.  As is the ‘Doctor Who’ episode ‘The Christmas Bride’.  Or any of the Robert Powell M.R. James ghost stories for Christmas), then all the relevant information, or, at least, enough for you to wing it in the pub, can surely be achieved in a 45 second long documentary.  Plus 15 seconds of how we made it.
Example.  Volcanoes.  Everybody knows volcano basics.  If they don’t, what in the name of a green fuck are you doing talking to somebody who is so culturally impoverished that they have not seen ‘Dante’s Peak’.  So, in 45 seconds, the documentary would explain the pyroclastic flow.  The 15 seconds ‘how we made this’ would be the film crew, in a Land Rover, going 80 mph (improbable for a Land Rover I know but it’s downhill with a superheated cloud of death also propelling the vehicle) screaming ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttttttttttttt!’ apart from one guy at the back who is so terrified he is simply sobbing.  Nor THAT I’d watch.
And the great thing is, you can have loads of micro-documentaries about an over-arching subject.  Vents, and people who live near FUCKING VOLCANOES are just two subjects I’d like to see covered in 45 seconds, the first because hey, geology is always fascinating, and because it would have to feature the public and 45 seconds is not long enough for anyone to become a ‘break out star’.
Of course, you have to be a bit sensitive, and avoid the trinity of subjects that should never be ‘taken lightly’, Yewtree, Titanic, Hitler.  Oddly enough, FGM is the perfect fit for a micro doc as not only is 45 seconds the upper limits of the ‘oh Christ turn over!’ threshold on that subject, but if you haven’t got the message about FGM in 45 seconds, maybe somebody should be making a documentary about you.

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.

A ringing endorsement

Once, we all knew where we stood with advertising, especially advertising for products that were actively bad for us, instead of products that we simply didn’t need.  We don’t require any encouragement to buy things we don’t need, but things that are actively bad for us require a little thought.  Specifically, fags and booze.

Time was, it was simple.  Shot of a bloke smoking, or having a drink, or both, with a final five second pack shot so that you knew what packet of fags to look for the next time you were in the fresh vegetable aisle (ahh, simpler, happier times).

Then, things got tricky, as new rules were introduced to stop booze being advertised to children and as making you successful with women, and fags being advertised…er, at all really.  Luckily, the new restrictions on advertising came in at the same time as creativity and coke consumption surged in the ad agencies and ad budgets blossomed to ensure that your average TV fag ad had a bigger budget than Bond and more creative talent working on it than ‘Blade Runner’, and booze adverts became funnier than the ITV sitcoms that interrupted them.

Now, there’s no money to buy coke or film big budget ads and the created world can’t compete with the reality, which is that if you go to the pub and nip out into the storm to smoke your fag, your bird will have been pulled by the time you get back by a non-smoker with a gym membership or a sports car (either, but not both, affordable with the money he’s saved on fags), a taste for wine and, probably, a sex dungeon.

Instead, manufacturers have turned to subtler means to influence our buying decisions, such as product placement. 

When James Bond was washed up, in hiding and hopelessly out of condition in ‘Skyfall’ his booze of choice was Heineken.  He may as well have been drinking cider on a park bench.  Once he got himself sorted out it was back on the vodka martinis but the message was clear – drink booze!

So in times when advertising budgets are stretched and audiences are sophisticated to a degree that a pack shot of a horsemeat lasagne with the phrase ‘buy me!’ flashing on the screen twenty times a second is more likely to have people running to post abuse on Twitter than running to the supermarket, manufacturers are working hard to associate their products with success and things that are high profile, or beloved, or both. 

This means that premiership soccer teams have their sponsor’s logo shirts, stadiums are renamed after tile grout or whatever and from 2014 anyone getting a tattoo of their soccer team emblem will be legally obliged to have the name of the sponsor added below.

I’d like to see endorsement and sponsorship developed.  There are, oh I don’t know, bloody hundreds of soccer leagues and thousands of teams, surely if top-tier soccer is supported by global brands then lesser teams should be sponsored by second and third division products, more poundland than premiership.  There must be loads of obscure stuff out there that could benefit from a marketing push; energy drinks imported from North Korea?  Snacks featuring horsemeat, because horsemeat has proved hugely popular, and that was before people knew it WAS horse.  Just re-brand Findus frozen lasagne as ‘Jockey Jerky’ and away you go!  And what about brands that are big in New Zealand or Australia – ‘Kangerpee, the true taste of Brisbane’.

Apple are famous for their product placement, in films maverick computer geniuses rarely save the world using anything other than a powerbook.  What’s noteworthy is that Apple have taken product placement to a new level by product placing in real life, making a deal ensuring that every Starbucks coffee shop must have at least one person in it using a powerbook.  Early tests where that person was a bloke with a beard working on the script for his documentary which he hopes will be filmed in black and white have been so successful that later this year Apple will role out its upgrade – ‘hot girl using laptop while wearing huge headphones over a knitted cap.’

Valet app

Why did Apple include a feature on their last iPhone that was supposed to be a robotic personal assistant?

The answer may be that they were trying to integrate the personal organiser functions on their telephone using an interface that saved you from having to flip from feature to feature to try and find out the simplest local information, or remember your dry cleaning, or your mother's birthday. In other words, they spent millions of dollars developing an application on their gadget to replace the Yellow Pages, or a diary, or a post it note, or a conscience. Or some basic sentient being skills like remembering.

This was presumably because the cognitive energy otherwise needed to remember that you are meeting Simon for cocktails at five on Tuesday can be instead channeled either to work on your next oh-so-droll tweet, or vigerously deny that binging on spirit-based drinks early on a Tuesday afternoon is evidence of alcoholism.

Selling a voice recognition package as some sort of personal assistant went well beyond the obvious reason why Apple may have done this; to make iPhone users' relationship with their iPhones even more unhealthy, reaching the point where the dependency is actually a recognised medical condition that The Metro can publish articles and Channel 5 can screen sensationalist documentaries about.

So perhaps the real reason was the economy and Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey cut right through any doubts whatsoever that Britain ever had a chance of becoming, in John Major's term, a classless society. Britain bloody loves being a class-structured society. We love it so much that we recently invented a whole new class - 'under' - to meet increasing demand to have somebody to look down on. It's like the Indian caste system but without decent railways. Downton Abbey's success, penetrating the nation's consciousness like a sex toy in a novel that sells well on Kindle, demonstrated that we know our place. It's in front of the TV at nine o'clock on a Sunday night.

Two things unite Downton Abbey viewers, they all think they are at least one social class higher than they actually are, and all of them think their life would be a whole lot easier if they lived in a stately home and had an army of servants to iron their pyjamas.

That's why Apple produced an interactive feature on their 'phone, because having something that reminds us that we are due at the pox clinic tomorrow, or that we have forgotten to pickup our dry cleaning, again, is the closest that most people are going to get to having staff. Even the gripes about the voice recognition was a deliberate feature, as it allowed people to complain about the staff (it also gave long term Apple gadget users a warm glow of satisfaction, they have been moaning about Apple's interfaces for years, like the handwriting recognition on the Newton. Long term users consider recent adopters nouveau riche).

But the economy being what it is, the middle classes can't afford to retain servants any more, though that doesn't mean that they don't want them, if only to fire.

What's needed is to confront this thing head on and model the interactive features on the iPhone 5 like a traditional country house. This means that instead of having one feature that does everything a bit crap and can't understand you if you have a speech impediment, like a lisp or working class accent, it has lots of apps with different specialist functions.

Surely it can't be that difficult to interface the iPhone's camera with a valet app that could archly criticise both your grooming and your lifestyle with pithy comments, all the while maintaining a faintly camp and slightly sinister tone? A simple click of the shutter, some diagnostics and the phrase 'sir is pleased to jest' will alert you to a potentially shaming sock/tie combination.

Certainly such an app is needed. While the erosion of the servant classes may have resulted in a removal, at least superficially, of some class barriers, it also means men's grooming has reached the point where an association football shirt is considered suitable attire, the away kit being deemed 'formal'.

The art of advertising

There is a time and a place for subtlety, for instance when trying to introduce the topic of anal sex, or why you have so many books about Adolf Hitler, into conversation with somebody that you have recently met. The problem with subtlety is that it depends upon two immense variables; the communication skills of the person trying to get their message across, and the sensitivity of the audience. Too subtle and you can fail entirely to get your message across and, to take a completely random example, risk startling your date by turning up on her doorstep dressed as an SS officer and proffering a tin of lube.

Cigarettes have been for a long time the object of intentional repression, the latest act being to hide the offending fags behind screens in shops, the way that gentleman’s literature is now wrapped in discreet packaging. Obviously it was not enough to put them on a high shelf to deter their purchase by, presumably, schoolkids, dwarfs and those who smoked so much it stunted their growth. Presumably this hiding of fags like a guilty secret or sensible stockpiling of decent booze in a wardrobe prior to having one’s in-laws come for Christmas is designed to deter the impulse buyer of ciggies rather than, say, somebody who is driven by a chemical dependency to spunk almost a tenner on twenty hits to feed their addiction and satisfy their craving.

Prior to this, advertising of fags was heavily restricted in what the images could be associated with. For instance, it’s been a while since Marlboro were allowed to show images connecting their product with cowboys engaged in such healthy pursuits as rounding up cattle and shooting Mexicans. And the days of being able to brand a Formula 1 car with your livery are long gone, as are the days of having a cigarette lighter and ashtray as an optional extra in your Formula 1 car. That’s health and safety for you.

This meant that creative types in the advertising industry, who were normally to oaddled with coke and booze to really develop an affinity with fags, were producing ads so subtle that they resulted in billboards adorned with a giant picture of a gecko and the words ‘smoking kills’ in letters eight foot high.

The same has been happening with alcohol advertising for a while too, with rules about not being able to associate alcohol with success, sexual prowess or, by the look of things, anything other than ending the night face down on some cobbles sprawled in a puddle of what you sincerely hope is just spilled kebab.

Advertising is now so subtle that folk can be unaware that they are seeing an advert at all. Once upon a time you knew where you were; a pack shot and the words ‘buy me now’ followed by as many exclamation marks as was thought permissible within the laws of common decency was considered a cutting edge campaign. The emergence of social networking, with Youhootube, Twatter and, if you believe the stock price, Facebook as mankinds’ chief form of communication replaces the previously very popular pointing and mouthing ‘do you want a drink’ over loud music as the pinnacle or persuasion.

Viral ads, so called because they are so bloody irritating, abound, with huge companies very much attracted to the idea that their customers will actually spread their advertising for them. They are right, of course, as soon as the first person started wearing clothing with the maker’s label displayed on the outside, Big Business knew it had their customers working for them as mobile billboards. Slightly more subtle are the ads and e mails that only turn out to be adverts when somebody exposes them, or thinks for a moment about why a pretty girl would be so fucking excited about a new flavour of Marmite.

Which is why I thought the van pictured was so refreshing. The company supplies safety clothing. And what better way to communicate this than by having a pretty young woman dressed as Daisy Duke but, and this is important, with a high-viz vest and safety glasses. She looks ready to clock on at the steel mill.

The joy of sets

A few years ago, 6th November 2006 to be precise, as recorded here:

http://gentlemanandplayer.blogspot.co.uk/2006_11_01_archive.html

I saw a woman buying a ‘Sex and the City’ box set. I recall that she was out shopping with her mother and that she looked excited at the prospect of going home and binging on Carrie & Co. I made the confident prediction that in a few years we wouldn’t be buying box sets. Well, the amount of the bloody things on display on the shelves of HMV would seem to indicate that I am crap at predictions, but at least I didn’t predict that she would remain a Sex and the City fan until the end of time, as I strongly suspect that for most Sex and the City fans, appreciation ended at the closing credits of the second movie.

While you can buy whole series of TV on iTunes, you can still buy a bewildering amount of stuff in box set form these days, not just television series, but sporting events. You can get the Ashes, or the Formula 1 season on DVD. Now, I like having boring sports on in the background as much as any bloke, but I draw the line at springing thirty quid, cancelling all engagements and settling down to watch an entire season of curling or something.

Sporting DVDs are, if I may be permitted a sexist generalisation, for men. Not aimed at men, for men, there’s a difference. Computer games are aimed at men but women play them too, but there are two things that no self respecting woman would ever purchase, a DVD box set of a sporting event, and a Jeremy Clarkson book. The male market is why there are DVD box sets ‘special editions’. Same product, on sale two months after initial release, but in a tin! Must have!

Binging on box sets is such glorious luxury. If you can ignore the ironing and the way your carpet is starting to crunch underfoot, then you have the moral fortitude to shirk the housework and spend Sundays on the sofa with the curtains tightly drawn, eating wotsits and viewing an entire series of your new favourite programme in one go, and, given the trends in box sets that are selling at the moment, learning a new language, probably Swedish, Dutch or Icelandic, probably the vocabulary that would allow you to converse more easily with a pathologist than a children’s entertainer. You hope.

Of course women buy box sets too, and not just as presents for men. In particular women buy ‘Downton Abbey’ box sets. Male fans can be seen hanging around the doorway of HMV, offering women money and asking if they will buy them a box set of Downton on their behalf.

And of course while spunking thirty quid on a box set is tremendous fun, there are on line alternatives. iPlayer catch-up is a glorious use of a Sunday. One can seek out charming and marvellous programmes that lurk on BBC2, 3 and 4 and end the evening a more educated and erudite person than you entered it, it’s like the science of the ‘Eastenders’ omnibus, but used for good.

Particularly worth watching at the moment is ‘Great British Rail Journeys’ with Michael Portillo, a man who has reinvented himself more thoroughly than Dr Jekell ever did. Before Beeching butchery, he would, like the Olympic flame, have travelled within 97% of the population of Great Britain. Now, he is confined to travelling on charming, picturesque stretches of line through beautiful countryside, occasionally stopping off to visit cheese makers or glass blowers and the like.

Unlike most rail journeys, one simply doesn’t want this to end. Possibly there are another couple of series in it before they are forced to move to ‘Mediocre British Rail Journeys’ and then ‘Shite British rail Journeys’ which will at least have that glorious television moment when many viewers recognise their own carriage or stretch of commute.

A binge on this series is like a holiday from home and that, together with our intolerance of having to wait a week for the next episode, means box sets are here to stay. (Disclaimer – that might be total bollocks).

An Englishman's garden

The English have a particular relationship with their garden that perhaps nobody else in the world shares apart from the Arabs. In a desert climate, greenery and water are signs of luxury. Sharing your garden is, in an inhospitable climate, a sign of hospitality. How wonderful to spend the day underneath a tree, shaded from the sun, listening to water flow while pondering if one was sitting on vast reserves of oil.

So too, for the Englishman, the garden is intrinsic to his ideas about hospitality, and water is at the centre of all he does. This is not a trait shared by the Scots, who mainly cultivate heathers of different colours and creatures that can graze heather which can then be deep fried. Nor the Welsh, who due to their climate are expert at growing two types of flora: those that look good when shaped by a prevailing wind and so are better at growing horizontally rather than vertically, and mould.

In the late nineties and early part of this century, a conspiracy between the BBC and those that owned 90% of the world’s supply of decking introduced the garden makeover programme and with it the idea that your garden could be just like another room in your house. For the English, a race particularly fond of getting as far away from members of their immediate family as possible, this seemed like a great idea, even if it essentially meant decking a two foot square at the top of the garden and retiring up there with a chair and some beer.

It was odd that this love of gardening ever needed reintroducing. The English have always loved to tame nature, especially if they show off by ripping up the landscape and then replanting it to look ‘natural’. Or just show off, with naughty topiary, or knot gardens (presumably beloved of Elizabethan sailors). In terms of hospitality and gardens, nobody does it better than the English, by adopting the practice of digging a bloody huge trench in your garden and filling it with water. It is an accepted convention that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and if that means a moat to deter double glazing salesmen and boiling oil for carollers, then what could be more English?

While the majority of houses are today tragically un-moated, it’s also true that the majority of houses with gardens are inhabited by those whose attitude towards hospitality is ‘come safely to my place of rest and eat a burger that will, in four hours, make you just shit your kidneys’. The barbeque, very much an outdoor event, allows the Englishman to combine beer and naked flame, two things for which he has both a fascination for, and no control over. Cowslip, new mown grass, petrichor – these are all the smells of an English summer but are any of them as representative as the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal as the inpatient chef commences combustion on another marinated masterpiece?

While fire may be the measure of the hospitality of the English host, water is at the centre of the world of any English gardener. The interesting thing about a water butt is that it is absolutely no bloody use at all when it is full, because filling it requires the heavens to open. And after a few days of dry weather, it’s empty, unless one is the sort of gardener who is able to make Sophie’s choice about which of your thirsty plants are going to get a drink today.

The reason that the English react so badly to hosepipe bans is not because they like to wash their cars themselves. In this age of metered water it is now actually cheaper to go to a municipal car park where half of the bloody spaces have been taken over by some blokes with a shitload of fairy liquid and a jet wash and have them do it for you, but rather because they genuinely cannot fathom why, when rain seems to fall, for free, out of the sky every single fucking day, water companies can’t hold on to some. Have these incompetent arseholes tried putting out some buckets? No? Why not?

Helen Skelton, action (figure) hero

In the regular polls held to decide who is the greatest Briton, Winston Churchill wins so consistently that a better poll might be 'second greatest Briton'. However, maybe its time he started looking over his shoulder, because the man has competition.

Helen Skelton is a Blue Peter presenter ('Blue Peter' rather than 'children's television' presenter because 'children's television presenter' conjures an image of a twat with highlights and primary coloured dungarees being condescending to kiddies while thinking that while their HND in drama and applied mime from their local 'University', formally a poly, formally a junior school, got them this job, they should, according to the career plan they drew up aged nineteen that's currently stuffed at the back of their sock draw, be playing the lead in 'The Cherry Orchard' at the Old Vic, rather than pretending to be a cloud and getting paid less than the other presenter - a puppet. A Blue Peter presenter could, one feels, if required, easily give an update from the front line of a war zone, they have that sort of calm authority.) who has not only paddled the length of the Amazon in a kayak, but recently skied, kite-boarded and cycled her way to the South Pole.

The girl has, to put it plainly, gumption. On television she comes across as exactly the sort of no-nonsense northern lass that forms the backbone of many a community. If it was all going tits up at lambing time, she's the sort of person one could expect to keep heads cool and soapy water warm. She's also very, very attractive. During her Amazon adventure, she had to get an anti nausea shot in her bum. The resulting footage and strain of simultaneously processing a fear of needles and the sight of a pretty bottom gave many a dad a funny turn.

Certainly, if these achievements are not worthy of the accolade of greatest Briton (something that in this jubilee year may just go to the most famous corgi-botherer in the land) then surely it's deserving of that other most public form of recognition - the action figure.

Action figures are great. For somebody who grew up sending his action man on dangerous missions behind the sofa, the joy of an action figure is in playing with them. They is why I have never understood the practice of issuing pop star action figures or dolls. I mean, just how much fun could you have with a collection of figures only slightly more plastic than their real life counterparts? The only purpose they could serve, I imagine, is to do reconstructions of acrimonious break-ups and backstage spats.

If you are a pop star, and they suggest making an action figure of you, decline. One day, ten or twenty years from now, you will be sitting on a chat show sofa, plugging your memoir, pasta sauce range or release from rehab/prison and the host will reach behind him to pull out a six inch tall reproduction of you in your prime. This is unsettling for two reasons, the first is that it's bad for your confidence to compare the dynamic miniature you to the middle aged balding fatty you currently resident on the sofa, the second that it's unsettling to think that somewhere out there is somebody who has held on to an action figure of you, who is not your mum.

Then the host simulates sex between your doll and a plastic gorilla and you're back on the crack.

Helen Skelton is the exception. She would make an fantastic action figure. First of all, think of the outfits and the accessories! Helen in the Amazon, Helen in the Antarctic, Helen in space! And you could have the studio, complete with pets and cameras, you could recreate your own episode of Blue Peter. Who of us have not, at some time or another, dreamed of stepping into the stilettos of Biddy Baxter and manipulating the young minds of the nation - but for good!

Best of all, Blue Peter being the show it is, they would no doubt show you how to make your own playsets rather than shelling out for them in the shops.

Kindling

When I was a kid, I used to watch 'Tomorrow's World'. This programme showcased inventions that would someday change the world, or at least your front room. For instance, Michael Rodd was the first, and only, man to spread jam on a CD to demonstrate that it did not impair performance. Everyone who subsequently bought CDs and discovered that a speck of dust could cause the CD to skip like a kid with ADD and a haribo habit concluded that maybe Michael would have been better off showcasing the weapons-grade laser that must have been used to read the preserve-smeared disc, as anything that could do that could probably shoot down an ICBM, a much better use for a laser than being used to bring forth the musical stylings of Dire Straits.

They also showed an electronic book. About the size of an etch-a-sketch, each book was on a micro-chip, which you slotted into place. The text displayed in red LED of the sort then popular with digital watches. This, we were told, was the future of reading. I agreed, I had read 'The Hitch Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy' and knew that electronic books were the way forward. It never went into production, possibly because of costs, probably because it was a bit of a shit idea.

Now, of course, it appears that just about everyone has an electronic book. Kindling used to be something you chopped or collected or, if a tourist on a cottage holiday, paid too much a bagful for, now it's a description of a popular pastime.

After years of waiting for an electronic book, the kindle is an enormous let-down. Its so...grey. The screen is grey, the plastic case is grey, the text is black (there's variety for you). This is not the sort of thing that Ford Prefect would tote around. There is nothing science fiction about the kindle, it's as exciting as an iron. And you know the big selling point for the kindle? You can read the screen in direct sunlight. Whoop de fucking do because, you know, you can't do that with a book, can you? The point of an electronic something is that it should be better than the non-electronic version. The computer is better than the abacus because you can't play 'angry birds' on an abacus.

An electric book needs to have two features to make it exciting. First, it should narrate books, in the voice of Claudia Winkleman. Second, you should be able to download books from the future.

Only these would overcome the tremendous drag factor of the many things that the kindle cannot do. It's shit at providing future fodder for second hand book shops, and if you are the sort of person who derives please from a well stocked bookshelf, a slab of plastic the colour of a dead sheep lying there does not have the same effect.

Worst of all is the lack of being able to annotate. I bloody hated French at school, each lesson an exercise in misery, until I opened what looked like an unremarkable exercise book, a battered hardback text book that had been through the hands of countless boys before me. This one though, was different. Some hero had, with a black biro and a tremendous surge of filthy imagination, annotated every illustration accompanying the stories of Jean, Xavier and Marie with illustrations and speech bubbles (in English) that turned even a simple trip to the bouloungerer into a pornographic festival of filth. When I turned the page to 'a visit to the stables' I had to work so hard at suppressing my laughter that I nearly ruptured something - nothing I've since seen on the internet has even come close.

Years later I was to encounter the artfully defaced book once again, this time flipping through the pages of Dickens to find that all of the illustrations had been re-captioned, with shocking and surprising results. If you want the formula for hilarity - it's using the word 'cockflicker' in the context of describing a picture of an earnest looking bloke in a top hat.

Try doing that on a kindle.

Yet another change of scene - television

Thanks to the (dark) magic of television, you don't even need to leave your front room now to visit other places. Good news for those who like to watch travel and wildlife documentaries on their huge tellies, great news for those who like to chow down on a family bucket with about the same table manners displayed by the lions on the screen towards that dead zebra.

There are three broad worlds that you can visit through the idiot lantern portal. Entertainment. Education. Drama.

Entertainment usually comes in the form of a continuing series, or soap. This usually consists of the big three. There's Coronation Street, which follows the lives of residents of the seminal street in a fictional Northern town in, from what I can determine, is a fictional bloody universe where no real world actions, events or sometimes physical laws apply. I saw a few seconds of it the other night and the characters looked exactly the same as when I last watched it in the nineties, I had to check that I had not just hallucinated the last two decades in the time it took me to make a cup of tea. I had aged and owned an iPod. Result! The competition is Eastenders, sponsored by Dignitas, a programme so relentlessly harrowing that every single one of its episodes ends with a helpline number and a voice reminding you that if you have been affected by any of the issues, call this number. If the BBC ever went down the X Factor route and made it a quid a minute phone line job, they could abolish the license fee overnight. And fund a mission to Mars. Finally the is the soap set in the countryside. Don't watch that one, suspect its the soap equivalent of 'Horlicks', I suspect other people I dulce, but can't think what would drive me to.

Education usually boils down to some superb footage, in slow mo, of a killer whale biting the head off of a parrot or something, followed by a blistering row when it emerges the while thing was mocked up in an underwater aviary in Hull.

Drama. One word. Downton Abbey. The programme is without doubt a phenomenon, and an excellent example of escapist television, recalling as it does a simpler age, that didn't really exist, where the pace of life was slower and the inhabitants of grand houses had little to worry about save exploding through an excess of kedgeree, Bolsheviks in the shrubbery and succumbing to one of the three fates of the upper classes; pox, ostracisation, or getting your knob caught in a servant, leading to one or both of the others. Viewers want the best for the characters, which is pretty bloody noble, given that they live in a castle. I suppose that the suffering the characters go through, complicated love life upstairs, rickets downstairs, generates empathy. But also, really, who wound't like to like a big bloody house with booze, servants and Elizabeth MacGovern on hand?

Glued to the box

There’s a story about the very early days of cinema, when the Lumier brothers were showing footage of a steam train pulling into a station. The audience thought the train was about to run them over and fled as only startled French people can do. Looking back on this event, which is often used as an example of the shock of the new, one might be forgiven for using the term ‘quaint’ as possibly the most charitable response.

A century later and I’m in an electrical superstore, tinkering with the notion of a new telly. Naturally, one cultivates the reputation as somebody who entertains themselves via a good book or, if push comes to shove, the wireless. The truth is that books may furnish a room, but a 50 inch plasma telly would, in my opinion, enhance it still further. The problem, I discovered, is that I’d have to sell all of my books and possibly a kidney in order to afford such a telly.

But it was fun to browse. Many tellys these days come with a pair of dark glasses, not, as I thought, as some sort of ‘Blues Brothers’ gift pack, but because you can get three dee tee vee in your home. Some were better than others but, bloody hell, the LG one was something else. They were showing a showreel of various three dee things, like a baseballer hitting the ball at you, aeroplanes shooting past you and so on. And yes, I was dodging and shrieking like a girl, pointing and trying to swat away butterflies. This must have looked, to the casual observer, as hilarious as any fleeing Frenchman and trumped my previous triumph of making an arse of myself in a shop, which involved X Box Kinect and no sense of restraint.

The success of three dee tee vee is going to depend on the programming. Anything wonder of nature related is probably going to be good in three dee, especially if they rig up some sort of cheeta-cam fixed to the front of a big cat, although maybe the sight of running into a wildebeast’s arse at sixty mph is not tea-time viewing.

Sports events would be good in three dee. Sky already broadcast footie in three dee, to make the event immersive. Of course, to make it truly immersive, they should send round a hot pie at half time. Likewise, the final of Strictly was shown in three dee in cinemas. I really liked this idea, not the three dee but the idea of gathering together strictly fans in darkened rooms – it’s like the heyday of the gay club scene in NY, and the very definition of ‘fabulous’.

Indeed the future of television may not lie in three dee, smell-o-rama, rumblevision or any other gimmick, but in the collective experience of event television. And why stop at simply gathering together to watch your favourite programme? The next logical step is to develop the already established showing of certain films in certain locations and site specific theatre by developing site-specific screenings, or at least augmented screenings. For instance, which of the following would enhance your enjoyment of ‘Downton Abbey’; big tee vee? HD? 3D? Or watching it while wearing formal dining attire sat in a drawing room being served cocktails and repressing sexual longing for the girl in the flimsy dress who keeps stealing glances at you? Or no adverts?

Or maybe the future lies in interactivity, mashing up television footage with a games console. Can we really be that far away from a nature programme that shows us the wonders of the deep which and comes with a virtual fishing rod? Or the wonders of the veldt that comes with a virtual elephant gun? Actually, Ray Bradbury wrote an excellent short story about the interactive nature programmes which indicate that they are not always a great idea.

Of course, collective viewing of favourite television programmes might also mean that when somebody asks ‘what’s he been in’, an answer might be forthcoming without needing to fire up IMDB. This is especially useful in Dickens adaptations, where even the most familiar face can be buried under more whiskers than is sensible.

G&P Awards - Culture

Book of the year – ‘Only to be published in the event of my death’ by Christopher Hitchens is probably the most eagerly anticipated book in the Groucho Club, but in an otherwise rather dry year for publishing, where rumours of a hitherto undiscovered Stig Lasson pop-up book for children proved groundless the publishing event of the year was the publication, finally, of the last ‘Bellamy’ novel, many years after the death of the author of the Bellamy books, Deirdre ‘Dash’ Flintlock, RN. The discovery of the completed manuscript and its eventual use in the settlement of Flintlock’s estate by having one copy each sent to Flintlock’s creditors in full and final settlement was a unique approach to distribution and debt settlement. Given their relative rarity, even with the some-seventy copies that were sent to various wine merchants and pub landlords, the copies now trade hands at inflated sums, with anyone in possession of a copy of ‘Bagpipes point the way’ declaring it if not the greatest Bellamy story, then at least the equal of ‘The clockwork clergyman’, ‘Fear in the mobile library’ and even the accepted defining Bellamy novella; ‘The Smack of Skull on Willow’. Having been lucky enough to receive a copy in settlement of a debt as a result of a sporting bet (the same bet, ironically, that led to Flintlock’s untimely demise and the resulting ‘chamois leather affair’), G&P’s literary editor can confirm that in his final days, Flintlock was drinking heavily, smoking illegally and writing divinely.

Film of the year – the biggest story in film in 2011 year was that George Lucas did not release another edit of ‘Star Wars’. Possibly the campaign by fans to write down and then send Mr Lucas their most beloved childhood memories so that he can wipe his arse on them and send them back, forever corrupted, has ensured that he can now do this one a singular basis and no longer feel the need to do it collectively while at the same time destroying one of the best movies ever made. For G&P though, one film was worthy of special attention. Showing only in the small mobile cinema that travels round the few remote Scottish islands that do not consider cinema as witchcraft, the restored 1930’s documentary ‘Och Thatll Da’ (‘The Day the Herring Came’) is a silent, Celtic language, black and white documentary about the herring industry in 1930s Scotland. Unflinching in its depiction of fishing, gutting and the wearing of Fair Isle jumpers, for years the film was banned in certain parts of the world for its depiction of beards. Now though, with a new soundtrack by Philip Glass, the famous scenes such as the herring landing, the seagull attack and the infamous ‘two women go at each other with herring knives in a dispute over either a woodbine or a bloke, I can’t be too sure but Christ, she’s now topless and the other one is trying to drown her in a barrel of herring guts this is just wrong’ scene really have stood the test of time. The film, of course, went on to win the Golden Herring in Iceland as well as renewed bans in the sort of countries that have yet to accept Christ as their redeemer.

Television programme of the year – TOWIE, I’m a celebrity (note: check trades description act, benchmark: Su Pollard), the return of Big Brother. This really has been the year of ‘reality’ television. With budgets for scripts and high production values dwindling, the temptation to blow the budget on fake tan and hope for a double-page splash in ‘Heat’ was obviously tempting in 2011. A reality check on reality television this year came when one could not distinguish the ‘Iceland’ adverts that ran throughout ‘I’m a Celebrity’ from the show itself, because the people appearing in both were about as ‘famous’ as one another, and Iceland’s party platter looks like a bush tucker trial. Luckily, it wasn’t all dross. The CCTV and home-video-camera footage from the Derbyshire estate of the Eighth Duke of Monmouth’s of his gamekeepers’ seasonal battle with the poachers on the estate was perhaps the most compelling television seen on British screens for some years. Grainy, sometimes silent, occasionally narrated by either the clipped tones of a gamekeeper or the slurred voice of a poacher speaking around either a swollen mouth or a head injury, the series had many compelling moments, many of them in green night vision. Many of us learned, for the first time, that red arterial spray looks quite, quite black on light-sensitive camera. As well as the human characters – the gamekeepers such as Fowkes, Fellows, Mobb, the magnificently whiskered ‘Normal’ and of course the poachers; Scumm, Viles and ‘Agggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhmyleg’ there were animal characters, ‘Badgie’ the badger, ‘Dearie’ the dear and ‘Shipman’ the Staffordshire Bull Terror. Wonderfully anchored by Kate Humble, this was, to put it bluntly, worth the price of the license fee alone and in the G&P office gave rise to the catchphrase ‘Frozen Planet – you can stick penguins up your arse’. Not true, by the way.

Enjoy Downton Abbey responsibly

There are many ways in which a chap can explain his enjoyment of Downton Abbey, the reboot of the class war which aims for the grandeur of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ in its heydey but, because it is intended for an ITV audience, is pitched rather more at a ‘you rang my lord’ sensibility and which, after all, is Julian Fellows’s attempt to do what Aarion Sorkin did with ‘the West Wing’; spin out a movie idea into a series.

As a Gentleman, one needs no excuse for watching quality costume drama, one can justify one’s close observation by criticising the wearing of a fob watch before supper, or explaining that a particular variety of gin was not actually available to the upper classes until a decade later than the scene depicted. As a gentleman however, you will need to have your excuses ready for watching a programme on ITV. Hardy dependables such as ‘my finger slipped’ or ‘the bloody remote’s not working’, such as are employed when one is discovered watching ‘babestation’ (an act of contrition if ever there was one as, has been remarked upon elsewhere, ‘babestation is essentially a reason for a complaint to Trading Standards if ever there was one’). Like late night viewing, one needs to keep the tissues handy, although one can always, when blubbing at an unexpectedly emotive scene (death of a beloved pet, anything involving rickets and a sickly maid), claim unexpected dust.

As a Player, one will be familiar with ITV. This is how you keep up with the football scores and know when Iceland have Pot Noodle on three-for-two. You will, however, have to have your excuses handy for watching a costume drama, as if discovered you may be accused of being a homosexualist, or educated. On such an occasion it does well to have a box of tissues handy, as one can claim to be knocking one out over the still lovely Elizabeth McGovan, prior to an evening of classic 80s DVDs featuring her when she was still tubby. On no account should you be caught crying while watching Downton Abbey, the shame will stick to you, like a dried tissue, forever.

There is though, one cast-iron excuse for watching Downton, and that’s the Downton drinking game.

There are two versions, ‘child’ and ‘adult’.

For the children’s version, you pick a single character and drink what they drink for each episode. I know what you are thinking – always choose a toff, as they drink more and better. A sound idea in principle, but sometimes a mistake. While a toff can do well in the cocktail and wine with dinner stakes, nobody gets through gin like a servant. Tip: if you know that the storyline may feature a maid who suspects she is pregnant, choose her and bulk-buy the Gordon’s.

The adult version takes a little more effort. You have to drink what everyone in the scene is drinking. This can involve shifting quite a few cocktails and glasses of wine, all the while ensuring that you match the servants gin for gin.

For the Christmas special I decided to go with the adult version, as this was the one time in the year that I had sufficient quantities of wine, spirits and no-work-the-next-morning to play the adult game. I think I was doing alright up to the shoot, but then I think there was drinking, or maybe it was one of the extras in the background having a snort? Was it a shoot or a hunt? I know that people drink an awful lot while hunting because a) without killing a fox you’ve got to get your jollies somehow b) nobody gets in the saddle and gallops over the countryside sober and c) when your horse rears and tosses you into some farm machinery that was parked the other side of a bramble hedge, it’s better to be pre-anesthetised.

The upshot was that the game was an unqualified success but I now need to watch Christmas at Downton again, as I fear I may well have missed a few, if not all, very major plot points.

(The alternative is to take a drink of your choice every time some costume drama incident happens. Depending on your character this can be, for instance, somebody saying ‘iPod’ instead of ‘gramaphone’, or downing a shot every time you spot repressed longing. If it’s poofs, that’s a double! If it’s lesbians…down the bottle and Game Over.)