Talk To Rex

I dreamt that I had a meeting with Gordon Brown on behalf of some committee that wanted him to fund their magazine in return for a year’s free subscription. The committee itself seemed to be full of Anglican-looking old biddies who were cross that I’d visited Gordon Brown previously and failed to bring up the subscription offer, so this time I was rather sheepishly accompanying them in a visit.

We descended a long, red carpeted staircase to get to Brown’s office, which was a large, plush affair, and he shook our hands and invited us to sit on some equally plush sofas. Then he got started by asking with a smile, “so, do we think families are a good thing?”

He obviously wasn’t that interested in what we really thought about families, because he immediately went off on one about family values and how he intended to implement them. I decided I’d show how on the ball I was by making a slightly jokey comment about how it all seemed a bit Thatcherist, but Gordon was extremely pissed off at me interrupting and shook his hand in my face as he carried on talking aggressively about his values. Then, hitting his head repeatedly with his fists, he shouted “but people just criticise everything I say and it’s like there’s this GREAT – BIG – STONE on my head!”

I woke up feeling annoyed with Gordon Brown for not being more willing to listen to what I thought.

Against the Odds is New Labour’s latest party political broadcast. Here it is:

In case you can’t be bothered to watch it, here’s a quick precis:

Archive footage is accompanied by disgusting music while a deep-voiced man with an acceptably RP working class accent explicitly takes the credit for the things Labour governments have achieved (“the bright shining vision of a national health service was for many an impossible dream… until we created it”) whilst implicitly taking the credit for things that were achieved by Tory governments (“they said we were wasting our time making a stand against apartheid and that things could never change… but they did”).

It’s a nice enough trip through the archives and if it has a message it is this: both Labour and Tory governments occasionally get things right. It’s an encouraging message, especially for one too cynical about democracy to be remotely partisan.

However, the Nymanesque strings and soprano soundtrack suggest that New Labour want us to read special political significance into it for them, which is worrying since they (explicitly, in this case) take credit for the Battle of Cable Street, in which a number of minority groups attacked a fascist march and a load of policemen.

For all that the minority groups were quite right to protest against the march (though I would question their methods), is this really something New Labour want to be taking the credit for? Especially when their government provoked the biggest recorded demonstration in the country? Or when police under its control have been liberal in attacking, injuring and possibly killing people involved (or indeed not involved) in peaceful protests?

New Labour might claim to be on the side of the downtrodden, or even the anarchic, but their leadership has proved that in that respect at least, they’re no different to the other side.

It’s enough to make you vote Tory, except…

Pathetic. It’s not really the smear tactics that bother me – since Labour have persisted in fighting the last three elections with similar campaigns I suppose they deserve anything they get – it’s more that it’s such a rubbish joke. Rhyming Jedward with Deadwood might cut it on facebook, but you want us to think you can lead the country and that’s the best you can do? And how long did you spend on photoshop, two minutes?

I suppose the message is this: both Labour and the Tories have crap ideas a lot of the time.

Today I made the mistake of clicking on the “Have Your Say” bit of BBC online news, and with an impartiality almost equivalent to that shown by the BBC I am forced to admit to our readers that the ridiculousness of BBC online pales in comparison to the ridiculousness of the people who read it.

The comments about the sacking of Professor Nutt are enough to make one take LSD or have a horse riding accident. I’ll skip over the GP (sorry, “gp”) who doesn’t use capital letters or full stops, and only briefly stop to take in Pat Hyde’s profound “Why have advisers if your attitude is.” Let’s get to the magnificent “jjs” from dundee:

I agree with the experts that cannabis is not as harmful as alcohol and cigarettes.

But how do we define harm? It’s a little more complicated ….

Consider two examples

Little boy – “daddy can you play chess with me tonight?”
Daddy – “wooo hooo heey man woo hoo hoo”

“Mummy can you help me with my maths homework?”
“woo hooo swish hee hoo fi fum diddly doo heey bwrrr goo man cool woo hoo”

Looks like the government knows best.

I have been considering both examples for a while now (well, for longer than I feel they really warrant) and I’m still not entirely sure what I’m supposed to glean from them, but I have a few suggestions (if jjs is reading, perhaps he/she/they could let me know which is the right one):

1. Daddy likes playing chess a lot.

2. Mummy is doing the vacuum cleaning; Mummy enjoys doing the vacuum cleaning (swish hee hoo).

3. Parents who take drugs are a lot more fun than mine were.

4. jjs was taking cannabis, or drunk, or on a horse, when he wrote this.

Professor Nutt must be quaking in his boots to have such detractors.

You would have to have been enjoying real life to miss the storm-in-a-tweetcup over the weekend in which Stephen Fry overreacted to a slightly negative comment on Twitter, to which a whole load of people without the excuse of being stressed and bipolar overreacted with even less attention to grammar and spelling (including an alarmingly aggressive Alan Davies).

But special points must be given to BBC online, who managed to turn the whole thing into something it certainly wasn’t: a news story.

As well as confirming our oft-repeated complaint that BBC online is unacceptably sloppy, the article shows a level of blinkeredness that even the Daily Mail might briefly blush at. After reporting that a number of twitterers rallied round in support of Mr Fry, the article adds that “not everyone has been supportive”, apparently on the basis that @Malcurion wrote: “The Stephen Fry story is NOT news, BBC, Sky, et al. Wake up.”

The assumption that @Malcurion was being in any way unsupportive of Stephen Fry takes a special kind of journalistic stupidity. Unless they meant that @Malcurion hadn’t been supportive of BBC online itself. Either way, @Malcurion is damn right, but the people he’s telling to wake up are so fast asleep that he’s wasting his time.

Of course, the story also shows that there are a whole load of other people who need to wake up – if nothing else, it shows that there are many ways in which 140 characters can be misinterpreted and misunderstood, and which hasty, illiterate responses of 140 characters will only escalate until respectable family entertainers are describing members of the public as “the biggest tosser on twitter” and the whole internet is ganging up on a poor guy who was only being lighthearted in the first place.

There is a news story here, and in case anybody at BBC online wants to write it, it is this: communication requires more than a 140 characters. In addition, communication requires time, to listen, think and understand. Fortunately, this incident was all over pretty quickly and Mr Fry himself has stepped in to resolve things. But it’s a warning to a culture obsessed by easy statements and instant responses – because if we’re not careful, before we know it the people who run the country will be dismissing complex and thorough reports on primary education or sacking scientific experts without even bothering to listen to or understand them, and then where will we be?

The Daily Mail article made me cross, of course. Just as it made any decent, self-respecting human being cross. But it didn’t make me unduly cross, since the Daily Mail always makes me cross and I have become inured to it. Moreover, if the tabloid’s underlying homophobia briefly surfaced to make the whole rag look less credible to its readers then perhaps it wasn’t an entirely bad thing.

This is a different matter. Stephen Green, in case you haven’t already encountered him, is a bigoted fundamentalist who expresses his so-called Christianity by threatening to picket cancer wards, fighting laws against marital rape and congratulating devastating hurricanes for purifying the world. In true form, in this article he declares that Stephen Gately’s death “speaks volumes about the lack of true feelings homosexual men can have for each other”.

That’s right, homosexuals can’t feel real love, like the love that Stephen Green clearly bears so strongly for other human beings.

Incredibly, by comparison Jan Moir’s article seems merely mildly disagreeable. Stephen Green talks as if he is entirely knowledgable about the homosexual world and its “mainstream” vices, and even sides with Islam (normally a sworn enemy) to threaten the imminent demise of such secular mores. His words are judgemental, ignorant, factually wrong, hateful and – ironically – perverted, all things that Jesus was pretty damning about, yet (and this is what really makes me irate) he claims to speak with a “Christian voice”.

To put Stephen Green in context, I would far rather see Nick Griffin as a regular visitor to Question Time than ever see Green as a panelist. Yet, generating far fewer questions than have been asked about Griffin, Stephen Green has appeared on the programme, even though unlike Griffin nobody elected him to represent their views. And unpalatable though Griffin’s views are, he is only claiming to represent British Nationalism, an ambiguous and even dubious concept – whereas Green claims to represent Jesus Christ, who didn’t die so that unpleasant men could dance on tragically young dead singers’ graves.

Stephen Green actually proved unable to stand up to the combined hatred of Dimbleby, fellow panelists and studio audience, even with his “Bible verse for every occasion” approach to questions (has any man ever known the Bible so well but understood it so little?) and it was ultimately left to Janet Street-Porter to stick up for Christianity. Since, in the case of Stephen Gately, Janet Street-Porter has already had to do the job of proving that not all Daily Mail columnists are evil, can we cut straight to the point and get Stephen Green taken to court under the trades description act? Or is there some old blasphemy law that says making Jesus look like a dickhead is punishable with life imprisonment?

This month has brought news of not one but two “authorised sequels” to books which I adore, Winnie-the-Pooh and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In both cases sequels are highly undesirable; Winnie-the-Pooh is a ageless treasure, something that needn’t and shouldn’t be added to (it’s hard enough to cope with what Disney has done to it), whilst the Hitchhiker’s trilogy was rounded off unexpectedly perfectly by Douglas Adams in Mostly Harmless in a way that left all stories tied up and all characters dead. Moreover, these are beautiful and rare jewels of literature and the last thing we need is some fake plastic jewels on display next to them.

If the alarm bells are not already ringing, then this interview ought to set them a-clanging. Let’s list the ways in which Eoin Colfer demonstrates his unsuitability to write a sequel to Douglas Adams’ book:

1. He sought inspiration in the music of the 70s – because that’s right, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is very much a product of the 70s, isn’t it? And not the timeless product of a genius whose style and references cross time, place and genre in a way that was completely unlike anything else in that decade…

2. ‘The Irish author holds up his hand and references a joke from the first novel: “And I got my digital watch, of course!”‘ – bloody hell, the man makes shit Hitchhiker’s in-jokes, is that what the book’s going to be like?

3. …um, yes, it rather looks like it is. ‘There are witty Guide entries, the Vogons and their awful poetry, the Infinite Improbability Drive and, of course, Arthur Dent and his companions Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox.’ In other words, it’s a book that recycles a whole load of Douglas Adams jokes.

4. As if to confirm quite how recycled the jokes are going to be, Colfer reveals his pride at a new character called Hillman Hunter. Geddit? It’s the name of an old car! Like Ford Prefect! Almost like it’s the same fucking joke!!!

5. He describes the original as Monty Python meets Mel Brooks in space, which epitomises his lack of understanding of what made it great. Douglas Adams’ writing has more in common with Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll than Mel Brooks, and the similarities with Monty Python are only superficial. When you try to do Monty Python meets Mel Brooks in space you get… well, you get the film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Remember how successful that was?

It comes as no surprise that Colfer reveals ‘For me and a group of friends in Wexford, it became our Monty Python. We had all of these little one liners and we would contrive to get the number 42 into as many conversations as possible.’ What you mean to say is you’re a fan, Mr Colfer! A rather frightening geeky fan too, who contrives to get the number 42 into as many conversations as possible and thinks it’s really, like, clever! I’ve been there myself but I was 12!!!

What we have here is a piece of fan fiction, in the worst possible sense of the word. Of course it is – why else would any author try to write their own version of somebody else’s idea? Neither would I wish to deny the likes of Eoin Colfer the right to do so, it’s the domain of every fan to indulge in that kind of thing.

But what makes me SICK is that, undoubtedly for the sole reason that it guarantees them a quick buck, a publisher is actually going to print and distribute this fan fiction so that it is somehow legitimised, allowed to sit on the shelves alongside a modern classic and cheapen our memory of something genuinely special. The estates that allow this to happen, who no doubt also take a significant cut of the ill-gotten gains, ought to be ashamed of themselves. (I know little about the Winnie-the-Pooh one except that there’s a new character called Lottie the Otter who is said to be “feisty” – I’ll bet she needs to be to hide the sound of A. A. Milne turning in his grave.)

It’s time we stopped letting publishers take us for mugs; I urge you to boycott these unimaginative money spinners, dust off the books already on your shelf remind yourself what original writing really looks like.

On Friday morning I learned of the devastating news that Ian Thompson, Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, had died.

Ian has featured in this blog as patron of the Uncertainty Division, which it’s fair to say was probably the least important of the many positions he held – so the willingness with which he gave us his time, support and, on several occasions, his room (rehearsal space in Cambridge was never easy to come by) sums up the generosity that characterised everything he did.

When I first met Ian I was less than a year out of university, struggling to find my way after my failure to get academic funding, unsure of what I wanted to do or even in some ways who I wanted to be. Ian was the Dean of Chapel at Selwyn College, the friend of a friend, which I think is worth pointing out because when he recognised and met my need for friendship and guidance it wasn’t because it was his duty – it was simply his nature.

The warmth and kindness that he showed me over the years that followed played a huge part in the direction my life has taken, practically, personally and spiritually. He supported me through the bleakest emotional times and at other times reduced me to helpless laughter, be it from a perceptively wry observation or an outrageous innuendo. He offered wisdom and help on numerous occasions, even when it wasn’t asked for; when, at the end of one evening out, we discovered my bike had been stolen, he wouldn’t hear of me walking home: ‘you’ll need a bike to get to work tomorrow,’ he said, ‘take mine. I was about to buy a new one anyway.’

I could tell a hundred similar stories, as could many, many people. His completely unnecessary death is a tragedy on so many levels and leaves a gap that will never be filled. It is naturally distressing to see the circumstances surrounding his death being twisted by the guttersnipe press for the sake of a cheap headline, the very thing he was afraid of. But it is with absolute certainty that I say he was an innocent victim – and, more importantly, a truly wonderful man, whose love for others made an impact on a huge number of lives.

There are not enough words in the world to express the loss we feel.

Who says you can’t tell a story in two minutes?: Pandore.

(Via Tim Bray.)

He goes so far as to tell us in the Village Voice. And it all makes a lot of sense; except that if read too broadly, no one would ever ask favours of anyone for anything, and then where would we be?

(Via Alex Epstein or Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer; I think I saw Alex’s post first.)

Also from Alex Epstein: Japanese insanity where schoolboy unearths fighting fish robot breast explosion. All under a moonlit sky.

Is Paul Carr a thrasonic journalist? Possibly. Certainly he’s an opportunistic one.

I’m not just talking about how he’s lazily recycled my recent blog entries to make one of his own. What I’m talking about is how, in true Telegraph journo style, he has taken my criticism of Dominic Cavendish’s caky review along with Mark Thomas’ statement that is was more a review of his employer, airbrushed out the bits he doesn’t need with the all-purpose airbrush-all sentence ‘it’s all very sound-and-fury-signifying nothing’ and turned the whole story into a glowing review of himself.

But delighted though I am to have my criticisms of Telegraph journalists so comprehensively vindicated in one fell swoop, I’m not going to be too hard on him for three reasons:

1. His comments about The Sitcom are so aw shucks lovely and quothable.

2. I have a suspicion that his claim to have cleared up the whole internet might just possibly be an example of the journalistic irony that Dominic Cavendish aspires to.

3. Assuming that to be the case, the rather po-faced comments on the post completely redraw the boundaries of what it means to have a tin ear for journalistic irony. I think I’m in the clear…