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Because that is what any Ofcom investigation into BrandRossSachsGate will be.
Sure, the Daily Mail discourse is about lewd, rude and crude Russell 'shagger' Brand and Wonathan '6 million pounds' Woss insulting National Treasure™ Andrew Sachs. And it's another stick to beat the BBC with. But the main issue for me is that the public broadcaster has been putting out material that's just a bit shit. And by 'shit' I don't mean 'unfunny'. Watching a Saint Bernard shag a Yorkshire Terrier would probably be quite funny but I don't think the BBC would or should show it on those grounds alone.
Since Sky starting showing Premiership football and the number of cameras at each event (sky)rocketed it's fairly clear that a director will want to use all the cameras. Because they can't all be looking at the football all the time this naturally ends up with half of them picking out hot girls cheering a goal or sobbing onto a male shoulder at a defeat. I noticed this the other night in the BBC's coverage of Andy Murray's match at Wimbledon. Murray had come from two sets down and was about to win the match, so enthusiasm and excitement were the order of the day. But the television distracted from the sport itself when every point was followed by frenzied close ups of cheering fans (mostly hot girls). Murray aces. Cut to cheering girl. Gasquet returns but it's out. Cut to cheering man. Et cetera.
It seems to do a couple of things; the cutting to different views is partly there simply because they can. More cameras were presumably introduced to provide a greater fidelity; the television technology would show more and more different views of the same split-second event. But not all the cameras can do this - so they oogle at the crowd, picking out attractive women, and also betraying the fact that sport is clearly produced with its largely male audience in mind. In tennis the cutting also means we don't get bored with that static shot high above the court that never moves but - quelle surprise - actually gives us a lot of information about how the game is occuring. Furthermore, especially in the case of large sporting events the crowd shots act like the canned laughter on comedy - reminding us that this is a real event and that although we're only watching on TV it's still really happening with real people there.
And that then leads to me asking who do the broadcasters think is watching? Are they showing it to an audience that needs too be distracted, otherwise they'll turn off, or to people who actually want to watch the sport? The BBC's Euro 2008 coverage was subjected to ridiculous filmed inserts with Adrian Chiles when they could've have been talking to any of the eight or so pundits paid to talk about the football itself. I can only feel that the BBC turns its football coverage into family entertainment with some kind of Blue Peter-esque filler because it doesn't believe its viewers want sport; they aren't producing a programme interested in the intricacy and detail of sport itself but an entertaining version of the sporting event.
I have been reading (and trying to write some) academic comedy scholarship for months. This has been reasonably interesting, though it probably won't surprise anyone that some of it is turgid stuff. As well as reading I have been writing the literature review for my tremendously exciting PhD. (Clearly I do think it is an exciting PhD, actually, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it, so the sarcasm is merely an attempt to hide the fact that it might sound a little dull to be excited about study but there you go I am.) I've just handed it in for a first year 'upgrade' to full powered-up PhD status.
My main frustration though - aside from writer's block - has been the po-faced writing that sees heterosexual, capitalist, misogynistic conservatism everywhere and therefore judges comedy unclean for consumption by good leftists. This is exacerbated by the writing that tries to claim that every sitcom is typical of the historical moment in which it was produced and that close analysis of the programme will therefore reveal hidden aspects of real life...
My central problem with these conconctions is that I find their foundational arguments quite convincing. It's the Marx-inspired take that social consciousness is defined by society, that all social products end up reproducing the logic of the society, and that, a la The Matrix, we are trapped in some kind of prison that is humanity.
Most of the steps make sense to me but I know the conclusion doesn't. I just can't find the point at which it is actually flawed unless it is in the ungrounded assertion that if social life is entirely defined by capitalism then there can be no ways of thinking beyond capitalism... This ideological infiltration then extends to fictional narratives which then reproduce such ideologies even in our entertainment.
Not only do I find the idea that we live in an unavoidable trap nihilistic and depressing but it is ultimately self-fulfilling in its banality: 'we cannot be what we are not' is its essential foundation, despairing that we are not infinite omnipotent star children. I think culture generally is more subservient to popular tastes and more flexible to audeince interpretation than some of these people claim. Which is why they don't actually do any real research but just sit around, watching TV and constructing elaborate dungeons in the sky.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Boring, dull, 60s pish. A poor man's La dolce vita.
Cloverfield
Self-satisfied 9-11 reinactment with pointless characters, plot and monster. More annoying than scary.
10,000 BC
Turgid racialised spectacle of the pre-historic kind. No dinosaurs. Why?
No Country For Old Men
Probably the best film the Coens have made. Beautiful and savage.
There Will Be Blood
Exciting and visceral. Power and oil and business. The ending was a bit of 'huh?' though.
Sunset Boulevard
A crazy noirish study of parasitism and Hollywood. Gorgeous, decadent and black.
Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End
Remember when blockbusters were good?
The Departed
Well-made, if not virtuoso, genre piece. Some dodgy accents, smooth camera work and bleak lives. Felt like there should have been something more...
It began:
- If Snot Boogie always stole the money why'd you let him play?
- You got to. This is America, man.
The Wire. Buy it. Download it. Just watch it. This is the best television ever made. It's not flashy. It's just perfect.
Hilary's celebrities are a bit shit.
Policies? I don't know.
I had a very full weekend which involved watching four films; The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, 1938) at the NFT, How to Get Ahead in Advertising (Robinson, 1989) on DVD in my front room, The Battle for Haditha (Broomfield, 2008) at the Soho Curzon and No Country For Old Men (The Coen Brothers, 2008) at the Kensington Odeon.
I was spuriously trying to find a way of combining my reactions to all the films into some kind of unified argument. A pre-WWII fable, an Iraq War docudrama, an anti-Thatcher satire and Americana meditation on violence almost defeated me; I expressed the frustration on Facebook and was readily assisted by T, who I'd seen them all with anyway.
All four films in some way are about characters dealing with psychological pressure. Discovering how they are linked doesn't necessarily help in any meaningful understanding of them. But it's there, so enjoy it.
In The Lady Vanishes Margaret Lockwood is told that a fellow passenger who disappears was nothing but a figment of her imagination. Or was she....? Richard E Grant suffers a breakdown and finds himself the victim of an evil boil in How to Get Ahead... The Battle for Haditha is rather more seriously about the psychological pressure suffered by American marines in Iraq and its murderous results. The Coens latest movie is a menacing crime tale, where Llewelyn Moss is chased across Texas by a single-minded and apparently indestructible killer played by Javier Bardem,
They all affected me in completely different ways; The Lady Vanishes was a mixture of the weirdness provoked by watching old films, where the pacing and acting seem bizarre, and the specificity of the plot that dealt with Fascists and spies. How to Get Ahead included a great performance by Richard E Grant but did suffer slightly from its sledgehammer criticisms of 80s yuppies and consumer culture. I also found the ending rather surprising, forgeting how bleak the satire would have to be is after the madness of Grant's acting. Haditha was nothing I hadn't thought about before - war is hell, young men can't cope with it - but it did make me wonder how to what extent the invasion of Iraq was always going to be such a pit of violence.
I'll start a new paragraph for No Country for Old Me as it's been nominated for eight Oscars and left me feeling bleakest. It was basically a horror movie filmed as real life. Javier Bardem would appear from nowhere, as if a sixth sense drew him towards the money he was pursuing, murdering people who stood in his with cold-blooded ruthlessness. Never mind there will be blood - there was blood. It was in this mercilessness that the film had its power; the killings were so matter of fact, so cold and so sudden that they were over before you'd realised it. Not only is the West no country for old men - it's nowhere for good men either.
I want to watch it again so might write some more on it.
I always enjoy Charlie Brooker, although I don’t really buy the Guardian anymore, so being given his latest compilation (the awfully titled and packaged Dawn of the Dumb) was very nice. I’d read through his Screen Burn collection and found it good but it did reveal the repetitions in Brooker’s style.
Reading Dawn of the Dumb last night, on the 65 from Richmond to Ealing, I realised something else about Brooker: he has a deep-rooted sense of morality. Beneath the ranting, the vituperative asides and the extended metaphors that normally involve torturing celebrities, there is a clearly-developed sense of what television shouldn't be. It shouldn't exploit the relatives of the dead, it shouldn't show the daily banalities of people trapped in a house, it shouldn't exploit the bored and the silly with phone-in games they will never win.
As Screen Wipe demonstrates Charlie Brooker is prepared to work fairly hard to attack and deconstuct television, criticising its increasing distance from reality and life.
It's big news in London that there's a new competition for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. I've only known the plinth with the Alison Lapper sculpture on it, and the more recent acrylic weirdness that is currently there. I don't mind which one gets chosen really; it'll only be there for a short while and I like the idea of a changing exhibition space against the backdrop of such an unchanging and iconic location.
Some people disagree. And they wrote to the Evening Standard.
The question of what to put on [the] empty plinth has seemed a never-ending saga... Is it beyond us to find one high-quality sculpture for the space rather than the succession of weird artistic offering proposed so far... Perhaps this failure to fill the plinth with a permanent exhibit has more to do with the lack of any great public artist to create on at the present time.
and
What's wrong with tradition in Trafalgar Square, a strongly symmetrical space that calls out for a permanent bronze statue on the empty plinth? My suggestion has always been either William Wilberforce or Thomas Clarkson... Let's leave the 'living status' to Bankside and the rusty cars to the Tate Modern.
It's not that these responses are fascinating per se. In fact, it's their simplicity that I found interesting. Presumably the letters were chosen because they expressed thier views without nuance or subtlety; both express their desire for 'tradition', 'symmetry' and 'permanence'. I smiled most the ages old desire to protect the north bank as 'London' that must be protected from the south bank's 'Other London'.
I've repetively expressed to friends and colleagues that just because you disagree with A, does not mean that B is right. However, when it comes to architecture and place, I am a big fan of resisting the desire to simply repeat the (supposedly) unchanging traditions of the past and replacing it with a tradition of impermance and the unexpected. Long may the empty plinth be filled and refilled.