Pot, Kettle, Black

Phil turns ugly? How can they tell?

Gordon Burn

Sorry to read the obituaries of Gordon Burn. I was a latecomer to his ouvere, until laid up with an unmentionable injury, at which point a colleague introduced me to his The North of England Home Service. He - Burn - will be missed.

Michael Jackson and the Half-Baked Prints

As a journalism tutor, I seldom want to see publications closing down. After all, they could well employ my graduates. Conversely, fewer newspapers and magazines might - and only might - deter vocationally minded applicants from signing up for a course.

I'm not unsympathetic to fears that magazines are becoming obselete: why be locked into a monthly production cycle when the internet helps you to keep up with changing events? Accordingly, I will forgive the August 2009 issue of Red for this: "If ever proof was needed that they don't make pop stars like they used to, then the frenzy over Michael Jackson's 50-show residency at London's O2 Arena is it ... If you're lucky enough to have tickets, get ready for a show that will go down in history" (p.109). Quite.

In all fairness to Red, it went to press before certain recent events. The same excuses for crappy content can't be used by wfm - note the trendy lower case - house rag of Waltham Forest council. Public funds are used to promote the local authority's interminable campaign against anti-social behaviour. The 6 July issue revels in an ASBO issued to Mr Minghua Wang, who will be prosecuted if found "having in his possession more than two DVDs or CDs in any public place in Greater London within the M25 perimeter" (p.4). No more boxed sets for you, sonny! Of course, the legal quibble that carrying three or more DVDs is NOT an offence can be overcome by attaching criminal penalties to same act. This is nothing to celebrate, and the council bringing The Men They Couldn't Hang - but presumably could still ASBO - to town does not excuse its ad-hoc lawmaking.

The good news is that this story appeared in the final issue of wfm. The bad news is that this miserable greentop tabloid will be replaced with "Waltham Forest News" from tomorrow - retro font, and probably more of the same authoritarian content.

Obituaries - celebs on slabs

A week of obituaries - Michael Jackson, Karl Malden, Mollie Sugden. The latter prompted a few 'pussy' gags when I saw punk covers band Scam 69 at one of my local pubs the other night. One person who I could imagine running out of patience with permafrost new wave acts is Steven "Seething" Wells, who predeceased the celebrity trio. Most commentators noted the passing of a gonzo journalist who started out as part of the mid-80s fanzine craze; I have uncomfortable memories of arriving late for a gig involving him and Attila the Stockbroker at Loughborough University. I'd battled through snow to get there and due to the layout of the venue had to walk across the stage to get to my seat. "And what time do you call this then?" Wells asked, seething. The diatribe continued long after I was (un)settled.

In a not totally unrelated development to 1980s Thatcher-bashing, I'd noticed a growing role for the media industries in the demands made by demonstrations. The rhetorical question "Whadda we want? Media coverage! When do we wannit? Now" reared its head on a Gulf War demo in Brighton in 1991, and the sentiment has swelled ever since, even as the politics faded away. Twelve hours before this post was written - okay, so I have not quite optimised my use of Twitter yet - I was on a 'Save our Stow' protest (see picture) where the BBC and Sky News were thanked from the platform while local news photographers directed the demonstration into a suitably photogenic shape. It's not my call to knock the campaign's media strategy, but it is interesting that news coverage has come to be seen as increasingly important.

What would Swells make of all this?

Britain's got to get out more

As a long-term critic of reality TV, I posted the above (miserablist?) line as a Facebook status update yesterday evening. It provoked a few responses from people who really should be going out on Saturday nights, including a school mate of Stavros Flatley.

Note how I didn't name this post "lancing the Boyle", or something similar. Roll on Big Brother.

It's not OK

In the past 15 seasons of ER, one of the "money shot" moments was when a patient expired after unsuccessful surgery, not long after the line "crack open his chest" was uttered. A cast member then got to call the time of death.

ER drawing to a close does not mean the end of such scenes, however. Jumping into the ER-shaped void nice and early with such a final diagnosis is OK magazine, running a Jade Goody tribute special that assumed, at the time of writing, she would have pegged it by now. This seems like the logical consequence of having her mass media celebrity deathwatch of the last few months unfolding in real time.

At least wait until the body is cold, OK?

Boba job

I had high hopes for the movie Number One Longing. Number Two Regret. I got my first feature credit, no doubt bringing new depths to the role of "Woods Guy". Now it turns out that Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch, in the role of "Robert A. Fett" in the film, had similar ideas. In his memoirs he looks forward to the day when the film goes on mainstream release (p.232), hopefully netting him a long term payday, in the style of Sir Alec "Obi Wan Kenobi" Guinness for Star Wars. Like me, I imagine he's still waiting.

E-Mailer

Farewell Norman Mailer. The obituaries came in thick and fast and everyone had an opinion. For many reasons -- some to do with Mailer, some not -- the links between his attitudes to women, his conduct towards women and his writing would always be under scrutiny. It was hard to scan these assessments without some mention of his stabbing of second wife Adele, in the late 1960s.

Few recalled his medicalised excuse for his conduct, which would fit in nicely with present day mores: "There are no modern Insarovs. Instead there are cancerphobes like Norman Mailer, who recently explained that had he not stabbed his wife (and acted out 'a murderous nest of feeling') he would have gotten cancer and 'been dead in a few years himself.' it is the same fantasy that was once attached to TB, but in rather a nastier version." (Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978), Vintage, 1979 ed. p. 22.)

Prevention is better than cure, they say. Better for whom?

1966 and all that

One of the duties/chores/professional obligations of the lecturer, especially the journalism lecturer, is to warn students, especially student journalists, of the shortcomings of Wikipedia.

Where am I going with this rambling post?

Recent I was working alongside a well-known former England footballer who had a slate of press interviews lined up. Certain internet print-outs were doing the rounds among his interviewers. "So, you met your wife at a dry cleaners..." started one question. "No, at an ice rink," came a bemused reply. "Where do people get this stuff from?"

Where indeed?


Try reading a book...

Extra! Extra!

Eleven extras were injured on the set of Tom Cruise's forthcoming movie, Valkyrie. According to the BBC website, police said there were "no findings to suggest anyone famous was involved". Oh, that's alright then. Or have we reached the point - like the tree falling in the woods - where if a celeb isn't present, then an event has not actually taken place?

That's entertainment

As announced previously, this blog is in a state of semi-retirement. The roses are coming along nicely, thank you.

As part of my life of leisure, this weekend I got to see Liverpool beat Manchester United 4-1. Before you double-check this result on teletext, I was watching the Masters Cup in Dubai, so it has zero consequences for the Premiership this year. Tonight, if it took my fancy, I could blow 995 AED on "World Celebrity Championship Boxing" at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, and watch various fighters including Tommy Sheridan MSP, who I expect to come out swinging. (I'd best get that low blow in before his UK fans do.)

Church of the Poisoned Mind

The text below is reproduced from an email looking for volunteers to help turn higher education into a branch of the entertainment industry. Enough reality TV already.

The Charlotte Church show is looking for outgoing lecturers to take part in a feature on the second series of her popular Friday night Channel 4 show. The idea is called 'Charlotte In My Ear' as I said on the phone, Ideally we are looking for a lecturer of quite an academic subject to take part.

Charlotte would be hidden in a room somewhere at the university and would have a direct link to the lecturer via an earpiece and she would basically be telling the lecturer what to say and do throughout a lecture. This would be a hidden camera shoot, the lecturer would obviously be in on it but the students would not be in the know. At the end of the lecture Charlotte would come in and reveal to the students what has been happening. we would then need to get their individual permission to use their footage of them. (i.e. we would not use someone's image without their permission.) We would not make the lecturer say or do anything untoward. It's really just a but of light-hearted fun, it's really about changing people's preconceptions of what a lecturer would normally do. Obviously we wouldn't expect the lecturer to anything he/ she didn't want to. Also we would be giving an incentive for the lecturer to take part, for example a donation towards a field trip etc...This is to be negotiated.

We would only need an hour of your lecturers time and we would endeavour to set up the cameras out of hours, so as to keep any disruption to a minimum. The first series of The Charlotte Church Show regularly received 2 Million viewers so is great publicity for the university. It would be great if you could put forward anyone that might be interested at your earliest convenience. I would hope to come and meet any willing lecturers over the next week or two. We are looking to film this at some point over the next 4 weeks.

(spelling and punctuation in the original.)

Validating voyeurism

"It's likely happy slapping will run its course" editorialised the Evening News, part of the Scotsman group, in response to this story (7 February, log-in required). Maybe, but not when the mainstream media comes close to legitimising it. "$500 000 for Anna Nicole death video" was the reported offer from the Entertainment Tonight satellite TV show (The London Paper, 9 February 2007). What's their going rate for footage of Steve Irwin's death?

It's the done thing

Blog watchers will be aware of the recent competition between bits of the commentariat to spot obscure figures from public life. It's like a neo-con version of Heat magazine.

By coincidence, this long weekend I managed sightings of Bob Crow near Farringdon tube, Iain Duncan Smith and Guardian feature writer Laura Barton. When do I get sent my membership card and decoder ring?


The truly observant will have noticed that the real money is in property (e.g. see Jeremy Warner, "Gherkin sold. London's commercial property market is booming, and with good reason", Independent, 6 February 2007, p.37) and not in trainspotting.