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.

Believe in Blather

For an organisation purporting to be a communications company, Sky appear to have a poor grasp of the working of the Telephone Preference Service, a scheme that allows you to opt out of receiving marketing telephone calls, the audio equivalent of junk mail but without the occasional benefit of a free pen or handy blank envelope to write a shopping list or to do list on.

One of the consequences of working at home is that you are at home during the day.  If you watch television you will know that the sort of adverts aimed at the at home during the day demographic are heavily skewed towards health plans for the elderly, or sedate cruising, the holiday equivalent of two spoonfuls of Benzedrine stirred gently into your Horlicks.  It also means that marketing people call you and you pick up the ‘phone because you think it might be something important, or at least not something that is either going to sap your will to live, descend into a blazing row, or both.

I don’t have Sky for a number of reasons, some practical, some principled.  For instance, I don’t enjoy association football very much, but if I am interested in knowing how a match is going, I’ll tune into Radio 5.  I also don’t need any more encouragement to watch any more television.  My sporting needs are well catered for via the wireless, thanks to Test Match Special, and my drama needs are taken care of thanks to box sets and binging.

I also don’t like Murdoch products, and although I have not seen Sky programming, I have no reason to think that his television programmes would be any different to his newspapers.

Finally, I don’t like the way in which Sky’s commercialisation of football and sport generally has eroded the social value it has, with kick off times for footie matches now arranged around the teevee schedule.  Football matches kick off at 3:00 on a Saturday.  This gives the fans time to get to the venue from wherever, have a pie, watch the match, and get home.  A footie match that finishes at 9:00 at night is bugger all use to anyone facing a five hour journey home.  Likewise, test cricket should be on BBC 2.  Like a nuclear deterrent, I might not ever use it, but it’s bloody good to know it’s there if necessary, for instance to be deployed during summer holidays in England.

The lad who called me was obviously working off a script, and the script included the many, many objections that I have to Murdoch in general and Sky in particular.

I was told that Murdoch does not own Sky, or much of it, the details were unclear, anymore.  Presumably the people that own the controlling interests are not megalomaniac despots, although if this is indeed the case I am baffled as to why and how they could acquire a controlling interest in a global communications company.

The lad extolled the virtues of the product and the programmes.  Fair play to him he did a good job.

However, what he was doing was arguing with me.  He just would not take no for an answer as he more of less rebutted or corrected the many objections I trotted out as to why I didn’t want Sky.

Eventually, I just went nuclear.  I don’t want Sky, I said, because ‘A Game of Thrones’ is one of my favourite books, and the television adaptation is poor by comparison.

Silence in the call centre.  Now, it is true that GoT the teevee show is great, I am not denying that.  Got the box set, love it.  But it is not as good as the books.  Moreover, I resent the hell out of its popularity.  Before the teevee adaptation, if you saw a stranger reading A Game of Thrones you could strike up a conversation with them.  In England.

There was no rebuttal.  Sky Lad must have known that for somebody to say something so provocative meant that there was no hope of selling the package.

Also, and I am not an expert, but having an argument with a prospective customer is unlikely to seal the deal.

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.

Still Fast

As has been previously documented, when I lived in a shared house it was far more ‘The Young Ones’ (at least in terms of squalor) than ‘This Life’ (although fair to say I did manage to have a relationship with one of my house mates, before she worked out that beneath the façade that I had erected (yuk yuk) to try and pass myself off as a fascinating adult was somebody with the emotional dept of an Arabian puddle – all I can say is thank fuck this happened during the years Doctor Who was off our screens, or she would have drawn her own, quite correct, conclusions from the number of sonic screwdriver replicas on display in my room and the relationship would have ended with the emotional equivalent of her blinking twice when asked if everything was alright, rather than in the pleasingly traditional manner of her finding somebody with more, i.e. any, muscle tone and dumping me like nuclear waste in a national park).  There was, however, a period where we had a mix of people in the house who shared the same interests; coming home and sitting quietly in front of the telly.
In retrospect, we should all have recognised that in terms of relationships, we were never going to do any better, formed a commune, bought i) the house and ii) an enormous telly and lived out the rest of our days wearing DVT stockings.
We didn’t.  I went on to convince somebody else that I was a fully functioning adult by not revealing the extent of my comic collection, hidden at my mother’s house, or indeed my mother, also hidden there, until it was too late. As for the rest, I think they are all essentially following the example set by the actors from ‘This Life’; you never hear from them but you sort of know they are doing well.
I think the secret to our all getting on well together (two blokes, two girls and one bloke who was never, ever, there) was that we never discussed anything personal, or if we did, we only did it drunk and so everything could be denied or diplomatically forgotten the next day.
So how did we communicate?  Not, I am pleased to say, through the traditional housemate method of increasingly aggressive post-it-notes left on bedroom doors, fridges, loo handles, plates stacked awaiting washing up and so on.  Rather, it would appear, through catch phrases.
This became apparent when I watched the two part ‘Fast Show’ special this week.
When it comes to comedy, reviving a show that has been off air is usually about as effective as passing electricity through a corpse and hoping for a reproduction of the original features, and about as funny as passing electricity through a corpse and having it reanimate and start throttling bunnies.  Not so here, this was hysterical.  In being so, it was in defiance of ‘Trotter’s Law’ - that a revived show is exactly as terrible as the original was beloved.
As the familiar characters and catchphrases rolled out, I recalled not sitting in front of the telly, but standing in the kitchen holding a packet of unlucky cod announcing ‘Tonight, I shall mostly be eating…fish fingers’.  I recall the watching the climax of a particularly bitter episode of University Challenge and, as the buzzer goes for the last question, my housemate piping up ‘Sorry, I’ve just come’.  And whenever any of us encountered another when wearing a dressing gown, one, the other, or both, would simply begin ‘Me?  The thirteenth Duke of Winbourne?  Here?’ and go on to describe something utterly filthy involving penguins.
The revival was spectacular, and funny.  And most important of all (J.J. Abrams please note) it did not take a cherished memory and Yewtree it.

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.

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?

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.

The Pope - one year on

A year ago the Pope shocked the world by being just about the only world leader not to use Twitter to make an important announcement – he’s off!

Pope news!  The Pope announced he is to retire.  This came as something of a shocking surprise for, well, absolutely everybody, as the firm belief held by all was that Popes were supposed to expire rather than retire.  Following the announcement there was a lot of speculation about why the Pope had taken this unusual red-shoed step.  The common reason; being able to spend more time with your grandchildren, does not apply in this case and, if that is the real reason, is unlikely to form part of any official press release from the Vatican.

The announcement allowed the media to do what they increasingly love to do most of all, which is look up the entry for the subject they are reporting on Wikipedia so that we don’t have to, rephrase it to avoid copyright infringement, don’t bother with a fact check because in this case the more outlandlish the reported fact the more likely it is to be true, and then broadcast it.  There was also  endless speculation, especially about who the new Pope will be.  Let’s be clear, speculation is simply gossip distributed by people wearing ties.

The most intense speculation was about whether the new Pope will be ‘non European’.  ‘Non European’ means coming from either Africa or South America and is possibly newspeak for ‘Black’.  One could tell from the way the newsreaders said the phrase that they were not sure about it, is it a racial slur, or just a quick way to describe somebody not of European heritage?  Safe bet is that if it is the latter, then it’s the former too but hey, who’s got the time to say ‘from Africa or South America’ and, if you do, is it ‘Africa or South America’ or ‘South America or Africa’?  Better to just say ‘foreign’ and nod meaningfully, like you would if you were in a pub in the home counties.

An African or South American Pope would, apparently, have been a big deal, but hardly a surprise.  Whilst Europe has lurched towards secularism, mostly as a result of smirking smart-arses writing the word ‘Jedi’ next to ‘Religion?’ on their census form and thinking themselves positively Wildeian, Roman Catholicism is very much a strong force in the emerging religious markets of Africa and South America (or South America or Africa depending on your geographical bias).  This is because they are both full of developing countries where the promise of a better afterlife, possibly including meat for dinner three times a week and a whole month going by without some ghastly ethnic violence or natural disaster, is very attractive.  No wonder these places like religion, it’s just like the old testament.

Of course, the real reason that the Pope decided to step down was probably connected to Twitter.  It’s one thing to get a news report, every day, that another person in your organisation is a peado, it’s quite another to have to face it when you fire up Twitter because you just have to retweet that link to a hilarious Youhootube clip of an squirrel and a row of vodka shots, and find that are the subject of quite a number of messages referring to you as ‘kiddifiddler in chief’.  

When you’re Pope and find out that in addition to having fewer followers than Stephen Fry you get droves of unfollowers every time another peadopriest is exposed, it can get a bit wearing.  

For any figure of authority, Twitter should be treated like a toxic substance, that it is the source of a cavalcade of condemnation is the polite way to put it.  The reality is that if you attract the ire of Twitter, a river of shit meets a tide of abuse and, accordingly, surfing is unpleasant.

Being Pope is, I suspect, something of a thankless task.  It’s something that you take on once you are past retirement age (like a job at B&Q but without the benefit of nicking stuff to supplement your wages) and you get the blame for everything and the credit for nothing.  It’s unfair, and unkind, to expect somebody to work until they drop, not even B&Q do that, officially.  

The art of the loaf

The art of loafing is nothing to do with twisting some seeds into your dough, calling the result ‘rustic’ and charging three quid for it, rather, it is dedication to relaxation.

Not that I have anything against work, industry and achievement, as long as it’s done properly, for instance the production of traction engines rather than the industrialisation of penguin genocide.

Don’t worry, this is not going to be another bloody post extolling the virtues of the shed.  But I will just point out that, generally, anything produced in a shed is likely to improve the world.  Brass clockwork novelty delights are made in sheds.  Destructive ideologies are not.  They, like bummers, are made in prison cells or public schools.  Workshops too turn out useful components and a number of workshops combined can turn out, for instance, charming cars.

Things start to go wrong when you industrialise on a factory scale, because not long after you get fed up with all the whinging and move production somewhere with a far more relaxed attitude to the minimum wage, where quality control can be enforced through the occasional execution.  The downside to this is that your workers will occasionally either try to smuggle themselves out of the country in the boot of the car they have just built, or record an impassioned plea for better conditions on the ‘phone they are boxing up.

The British Empire was, of course, founded on outsourcing and foreign labour.  We exported the British brand, and the pox, around the world and imported all sorts in return, like a lingering sense of entitlement and assumption that everyone should speak English.

Actual work can be measured thusly: do you start with a task that has measurable goals?  Do you end with a sense of a job well done and a well deserved pint?  Then that’s work.  Anything else is just dicking around.

In the twenty first century, it’s getting harder to relax.  Otherwise, why would there be a whole industry dedicated to helping us do so?  Time was, relaxing was easy.  You toiled until you were shaky with fatigue then drank cider until you were lying down.  Uncomplicated. 

Now, we think we are relaxing when we are in fact not.  For instance, sitting in front of the television might be considered by some to be a form of relaxation.  And it is, if you are watching a DVD of; a flickering fire, a lady playing the harp or a blank screen.  Anything else is too much stimulation.  Soaps now frequently end not just with a drum roll and an actor holding an expression in a manner unencountered in real life outside of anyone pictured straining for a shit, but with a help line for people affected by issues.  And ‘documentaries’ that are ostensively intended to make us feel better about ourselves by chronicling the dysfunctional lives of those with for instance amusing mental health issues, an addiction to biscuits, being fucking clueless about how to organise a wedding, a predilection for acts of self pollution involving Pot Noodle or just being chavs, simply result in the viewer being made to feel simultaneously uncomfortable and sad.

Mobile ‘phones have put an end to the micro-loaf, those few minutes where one might reasonably be expected to not think about very much at all.  No bugger looks out of train windows any more, they are all either playing games or updating their status to from ‘on platform’ to ‘on train’.

Loafing takes effort.  First off, you need a free afternoon in the week.  Then, you need to get into your pyjama trousers AND to be comfortable answering the door in them if required.  Then, you need find somewhere comfortable to lie horizontally that is not a bed.  Finally, you need to go through all the tedious things you should be doing instead, and realise that they are either not that urgent, not that important, or will be so much better achieved after a rest.

After a while, you will wake up.  With luck, the light will have drained from the sky meaning a) your attire is socially acceptable and b) you can now uncork dinner and move to phase two: unwinding.

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.’

Culture Corner

Throughout 2013, Gentleman & Player has never been short of an (unpublished) opinion, informed or not, about the cultural landmarks of the year (such as asking ‘is the Costa or the Orange the one for lezzas?’ before not dashing off 700 words on modern literary prizes).  In an outstanding year for the arts, here were some of the highlights.

Television

Reviews and articles about the final season of ‘Breaking Bad’ continued a trend started by coverage of ‘The Wire’ which implied that the audience is somehow intellectual simply because they were watching the thing.

Strictly Come Dancing continued to amaze, Sir Bruce is a testament to either the wonders of animatronics, or the existence of necromancy.

‘Day of the Doctor’ was best enjoyed in a cinema.  Not just because sitting in the dark gave fans a chance to touch a girl, but because the 3D was perfectly realised and there was, appropriately, yet another dimension to the experience by sharing it with others.

BBC ALBA was a revelation.  You can see premiership football and rugby on the BBC.  OK, it’s Scottish premiership football and rugby, and the football is mostly Partick Thistle, but it’s excellent for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, in the world of Scottish sectarian football, Partick Thistle are like a DMZ, wearing a Jags scarf is guarantee of safe passage in Glasgow.  Interesting to see if this continues if they continue to be quite good.  Second major bonus is that all the commentary is a Gaelic, so nobody can understand a word.  But it all sounds poetic and wonderfully passionate.  Blissful.

Art

Manet at the RA was a masterclass in how to do a lot with not very much at all.  Manet was rich enough not to be arsed to finish most of his paintings.  Still, the new audio guides are good, including a little screen where you can see a picture of the picture obscured by the crowd in front of you.  This was a blockbuster and with London so handy for the Eurostar judging by the accents, and the manners, quite a lot of French had made the trip to see the exhibition.

The RA Summer Exhibition 2013 – surprisingly un-shit this year.

Doig at the Scottish National Gallery – confronted by enormous, colourful canvasses of tropical landscapes, the indigenous population didn’t know what to make of them.  Is a blue sky modernist or surrealist?

Theatre

The exceptional performances in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ underlined the casual cruelty of the fairy folk.  Sheridan Smith deserves special credit for being able to divert attention from David Walliams, who appeared to be possessed by the ghost of Frankie Howerd.  Smith’s legs are even better than her acting talent, which is exceptional.

Jude Law’s stellar performance as Henry V confirmed that it’s always a great idea to put a film star on the boards.  In a spellbound audience, you could hear the collective raising of hairs standing up on end during the ‘breach’ and ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speeches.  The tears in my eyes were due to an excess of dry ice used as smoke for the battle scenes.

My Sherlock

Let’s be honest, given the choice between visiting London 

or Switzerland, where would you go?

Basil Rathbone was always my Sherlock Holmes, just as Nigel Bruce was always my Doctor Watson, and they always will be. 

My affection for these two actors as the definitive Homes and Watson was seeded when I saw their films as a child.  Years later and working my way through the DVD collection, the magic is undiminished which is, I am discovering now that I have had the opportunity to revisit other childhood favourites through the magic of Youtube, a rare experience.  Some programmes were, apparently, very much of their time and have not aged well; maybe one is less discerning as a child, or simply addled with artificial flavourings from Monster Munch.

Now new generations are inheriting their definitive Holmes and Watson.  Jeremy Brett was, for many, the epitome of Holmes.  I’ve never seen the ITV adaptation myself because they are afflicted with the same menace that besets all ITV drama – adverts.  One moment the game is afoot, the next you are confronted with an ad for something called ‘Anusol’ and before you can hit ‘mute’ you hold the answer to the riddle ‘what on earth is Anusol?’, something you can never unlearn.

On the big screen, various big names have taken turns trying on the deerstalker for size, none I think more successfully than Robert Downey Jr.  Is it because he mixes just the right amount of manic energy with the conviction to addiction only somebody with his past can bring, along with a physical aptitude for violence that the books always hinted at?  Partly, but mainly because I saw the first film with my Mum as a Christmas treat and so it’s now embedded deep in the ‘positive association’ wing of the mansion of my mind (which also has a f**king enormous wine cellar).

The BBC reboot of ‘Sherlock’ though, is nothing short of a tour de force in fan creation, as if it’s made of cult.  And it was interesting to see evidence of that the other day when I was near Barts (for reasons, I should be clear, entirely unrelated to the sort of condition requiring something that might be advertised on ITV).

St Bartholomew’s Hospital is in the Smithfield area of the City of London, with St Paul’s, The Old Bailey and the famous meat market nearby, and is famous for a number of reasons, including having the only statue of Henry VIII in London atop one of its entrance gates.  It is also where John Watson studied to be a doctor and where Sherlock abuses corpses in the name of criminal science and where, in the episode ‘The Richenbach Fall’, he apparently jumps to his death.

Red telephone boxes are not an unusual sight in London.  Far rarer than they used to be of course, victim first to a campaign by BT to replace an icon with stainless steel monstrosities with about as much charm as an abattoir floor, and then to the rise in popularity of the mobile ‘phone, which saw a move away from people having conversations in soundproofed boxes on a landline to a fashion for bellowing your business at passers-by.

And telephone boxes with pieces of card in them are not an unusual sight.  Indeed, there was a period when they were prolific as prostitutes advertised their, er, goods, in telephone boxes.  It has to be said that the trend in covering the glass of a telephone box in ‘business’ cards also afforded privacy for that other function of a telephone box so beloved of late night revellers.

The telephone box near Barts though bears not adverts but messages of love and support for Sherlock.  Presumably, these have been left by fans of the show from all over the world who have come here.  It may seem odd that fans would visit the site of the faked death of a fictional character but the notes, if they are authentic and not a prop, are surely simply a continuation of the same fan fervour that seized the readers of ‘The Strand’ when Holmes went over the Falls the first time in 1893.  And let’s be honest, given the choice between visiting London or Switzerland, where would you go?

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).

A moving experience

I’ve been helping my mother move house. This mostly consists of my being by turns grumpy, sweaty, sulky and hysterical while my mother organises everything, like a cross between a ringmaster and a cowboy herding sheep.

We were leaving the home that I had lived in for a few teenage years before buggering off for a life of not so gainful employment with a brief but deeply shit career in the private sector so while weekends at home were fun, I did used to rather dread the prospect of work on a Monday. Hence the house held mixed memories and I wasn’t sorry to leave. I did wonder about Mum though, and had nightmare visions about having to pry her fingers off the door, like Thatcher leaving Downing Street (you just know that they had to get rid of the carpets because of her claw marks in them).

Not a bit of it, close door, in car, off to estate agents, not a backwards look or remark.

This was good, because by then my condition could have been described as ‘frazzled’. Mum had been packing for weeks, months even but, Jesus, so much stuff! We had got through all the proper boxes and the big boxes and were slowly having to use smaller and smaller boxes, it was like packing up Russian dolls.

Thankfully, years of playing Tetris paid off and I was able to fill the back of my hire car to the roof with loads of stuff in boxes. This was in addition to the loads of stuff I had taken to the tip.

And that was in addition to the stuff that I had taken to the tip on previous occasions, which was a lot. If the local tip had some sort of loyalty scheme, I’d probably have a skip named after me by now.

Once at the new house, we unpacked all the stuff we had packed. Two things occurred to me, the first was that I could really, really get to hate the smell of cardboard and the second was that nobody, with the exception of the owner of a furniture warehouse, needs that many side-tables. My mother has more side tables than places to put them. The laws of geometry and physics have been bent to allow he to have all her side tables in one room – it’s no coincidence that the large haydron collider went bust, its entire power output is being used to distort my mums front room into ten dimensional space to allow her to display her vast collection of nick-knacks on her side tables.

My melt-down moment came when I discovered that I had packed, transported and unpacked some red and amber glass rock things that are used as part of a flame effect for an electric fire. An electric fire which my mother no longer owns.

My melt-down did not manifest itself in the usual rant. More worryingly, it took the form of a cold and shocking realisation that I. was. Exactly. The. Same.

I helped settle Mum in her new home (realised that I liked it more than the old place) and, a couple of days later, came home and got busy.

First thing to go – my video collection. Hundreds of video tapes. Films and programmes. Thousands of hours of entertainment. This was my entertainment bank, compiled as a young man when I was pretty sure that the rest of my adult life would consist of me living alone with nothing much to do except watch my favourite movies. This was my weapon against boredom.

Three things happened; the invention of the internet, Nintendo and getting married. Believe me, the concept of being bored has not existed for me since about 1998 when the slightest sign of it is met with the perky yet dread enquiry ‘want to chat about our relationship?’.

Anyway, who’s got time to be bored? There’s freeview, digital radio, there’s Mario and Resident Evil, there’s all the stuff on the internet. Bored, alone? Spend a guilty three minutes watching surprising filth and then an hour disinfecting your hard drive, clearing your browser history and showering the guilt off.

My kind of marathon

Thanks to the magic of youhootube or whatever it’s called, I’ve spent about nine solid hours this weekend slumped on a sofa binging on ‘Black Books’. Marathon sessions of any programme are when you find out if they are really good; does the programme have the ability to silence that part of your brain that is telling you that you are Wasting Your Weekend, that you should Be Doing Something, even if it’s just opening the curtains, showering or getting out of your dressing gown.

Luckily, the part of my brain – the ‘perky section’ – that tells the rest of me that it should go for a walk and enjoy the majesty of the turning leaves and the brisk Autumn air has a hard enough time fighting my internal sloth without having to put up with external influences.

So sofa it was. I have to admit that things got a little tricky about a third of the way in, when my hangover abated long enough for me to realise I was hungry, but by putting together a running buffet on a plate, I was able to bring by starch, salt and fat levels up to optimum. I was then able to spend the next two hours fighting nausea but at least fighting nausea on a full stomach.

So it’s dark now and too late to Do Anything. Well, not quite dark, fireworks light the night all colours and bangs and pops make the place sound like downtown Bagdad on any night of the week. The air is no longer fresh but has the fresh tang of borderline legal Chinese gunpowder. Opening the curtains does reveal rockets and other skybourne fireworks, but also makes you wonder what you’re missing as you watch back gardens light up with what you hope is an impressive firework rather than, you know, somebody getting pissed and throwing paint thinner on the barbeque.

Tomorrow night is bonfire night, best enjoyed with a mug of soup stirred by a sausage – with a sparkler stuck in it. It’s also the first year when I think I shall try launching my rockets Pakistani style – in a BBC report recently celebrating Parkistani men (it’s always bloody men isn’t it) were seen gripping the stalks of rockets and then lighting them. Jesus, what savagery…can these third world idiots not afford a decent pair of gardening gloves – I bet not one of them even owns a decent set of pruning shears.