I read the news today, oh boy.

If, as is often said, no news is good news, then it would logically seem to follow that most news is invariably bad. This depressingly bleak assessment certainly seems to be ringing truer and louder than ever at the moment. 

The death tolls caused by natural disasters Down Under and popular uprisings in the Middle East jostle for the attention of a fickle media and quite rightly so. Events such as these, far away though they may be, are of real international concern and significance and people in this country are genuinely interested in them. But whilst sad news is never something to be greeted lightly, there is something slightly inappropriate in the way the media have reported on these events.

On Wednesday, following news overnight of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, The Sun newspaper, ran with the headline: "10 Brits Dead in Kiwi Quake". Then, the following day, with the focus of the press having switched 10,000 miles back to Libya, The Daily Mail's front page declared: "British rescue turns to farce: Hundreds of terrified Britons trapped in Libya". Although somewhat unusually, The Mail decided to shun the colon in the headline, opting instead to punctuate with the slightly less conventional, but in no way grammatically inferior, St George's Cross. Presumably in case we mistook them for some of those no good Johnny foreigners.

Though both articles are broadly concerned with the major issues of the day, their overemphasis on the plight of British people in these situations is in danger of detracting from the real story. That British people are trapped in Libya is news, but it is surely news of secondary importance when compared with the sea change currently underway in that country. Likewise, and this is obviously a more sensitive subject, reporting how many British people are estimated to have died in the Christchurch earthquake is absolutely crucial, but it does seem in bad taste to do so without making reference to the total loss of life.  

Clearly there are issues of representation at play here, with the British media needing to appeal to the expectations of British people, who are after all are their primary audience. Cultural proximity also plays a role, that is to say that we are most interested in events affecting people that we can most identify with, in this case people of the same nationality. A clear example of this latter point can be seen in the reporting of last month’s devastating floods in Queensland, Australia, which happened to coincide with similar events in Sri Lanka, Brazil and Malaysia. Despite the fact that the number of casualties was actually greater in the South East Asian and South American disasters; the coverage of the flooding in Australia was unquestionably given greater press prominence in this country. The common language, colonial history, sporting rivalry and First World economy shared between Britain and Australia, not to mention the considerable numbers of British expats living Down Under, makes Australian affairs automatically more newsworthy than those in less familiar countries.  

Such press bias however reached ridiculous proportions on Thursday evening, when the BBC News at Ten led with the story of the difficulties incurred at Tripoli airport as British nationals sought to flee the increasingly volatile situation in Libya. The BBC showed footage of David Cameron apologising for the airport’s poor conditions as trapped British Citizens testified to a lack of organization, big queues and long waits. Without wanting to make light of the trials and tribulations of people trying to flee a country in the grips of what could well turn into a civil war, the inconvenienced travel arrangements of British citizens should not take precedence over events of greater importance in the news of this, or indeed any other, country. 

News is a subjective construct: decisions made by editors and producers determine what tomorrow’s big stories will be and when these decisions are made it is only right that those elements which are most likely to appeal to a British audience are pulled out. But this process, if not handled sensitively, can lead to a distortion of the facts, in which a marginal national involvement becomes the central focus of coverage, as in the evacuation of British citizens from Libya. Ultimately there isn’t going to be a newsworthy “British” angle to every international news story and if journalists seek to artificially insert one, they risk reporting on events which are, when compared to momentous changes in history, inconsequential.  

When the chips are down

Given what’s been going on in the Middle East of late, you can just about be excused if an event taking place somewhat closer to home and of equal seismic significance has, so far, escaped your attention. I am of course talking about National Chip Week, 2011.

Yep, sandwiched between World Day of Social Justice (Feb 20) and International Women’s Day (March 8), like a chip butty served between two pieces of United Nation’s endorsed bread, is our very own National Chip Week. Starting today, National Chip Week will run until Friday and is this year celebrating its 20^th anniversary of raising awareness, consumption and sales of the humble chip.

Presumably, righting the wrongs of social and gender inequalities the world over only takes 24 hours; whereas making people aware of the merits of fried potato requires a whole working week. And whilst International Women’s Day and World Day of Social Justice rely on the backing of the lowly United Nations, National Chip Week receives its benefaction from the mysterious and powerful Potato Council! Because whilst all this may appear innocent enough, scratch beneath the golden-brown crispy surface and you’ll find something a bit more sinister going on.

In the boom years, if you can remember that far back, we were all told to eat healthily. In fact you couldn’t walk around Westminster without bumping into some celebrity chef, badgering ministers to serve less deep fried doner kebabs and more sous vide celery in schools. Chips were out in the cold and in their place the Government ruthlessly administered a strict policy of five portions of fruit and vegetables per person. For a time, instead of filling awkward silences with mundane chats about the weather, we’d enquire whether complete strangers were getting their five a day and how. 

But that was then and this is now; and now things are very different. For a start nobody’s got any money anymore, least of all the Government. Well that’s not entirely true; fish and chip shops have actually got more money nowadays. Lauded as a recession-buster, (or batterer, sorry); chip shops are actually doing better than ever and are currently worth £1.2bn a year to the UK economy. That means £1 of every £100 spent on food in this country is spent in a fish and chip shop. That kind of money carries a fair amount of clout. Rumours abound that it was the dark forces of the chip lobby that shipped Jamie Oliver off to America to unleash his unique style of mockney irritation on an entirely unsuspecting public.  

                                  

This should not come as much of a surprise. It is a characteristic of Big Business that it exerts its often undesirable influence on governments. Big Coal, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, they’ve all done it in the past and now it seems it’s the turn of Big Potatoes.

Look closely at the policies of the coalition and the influence is clear to see, hidden in plain sight. Take the Big Society, often dismissed as a meaningless phrase used to put a positive spin on the removal of state assistance and subsequent second-coming of Dickensian-esque inequality. But seen in the light of the government’s secret tie up with the bigwigs at the Potato Council, all that talk of salt of the earth types, chipping in to get us out of the frying pan of recession seems to suddenly make a bit of sense. Indeed the only interpretation of the Big Society that actually makes sense is a wholly literal one. Our society will indeed be bigger under the coalition: it’ll be positively obese if they get their way. 

It’s nothing short of brainwashing; neuro-linguistic programming to make us all eat as many chips as possible, but to what ends? To clog up the arteries of the trouble making youth with saturated fats, thus making them easier to kettle in future protests? I wouldn’t like to say…though I wouldn’t mind another kettle chip.

We’re all hypocrites now….

Whilst tourist boards in Latin America and Eastern Europe were still busy thanking Jeremy Clarkson for his latest endearing remarks, two other social pariahs, Richard “smash it” Keys and Andy Gray, were welcomed back into the media fold this week taking the morning slot on TalkSport radio.  

The prodigal sons return was greeted with considerably less fanfare than their ignominious departure from Sky two weeks ago and I couldn’t help but be a little disheartened by the announcement from TalkSport programme director Moz Dee, (since when has that passed for a name by the way?), that Keys and Gray’s remit will not extend to current affairs or politics. I was sincerely looking forward to Gray’s take on the Middle East peace process, though I do worry if he would be fully able to articulate his views without the use of his trusty supercomputer. I guess now we’ll never know.   

Like Clarkson, Keys and Gray are well placed to testify to the enduring truth that everybody loves a good witch hunt. Disregarding the severity of their indiscretions for a moment, most people’s overriding feeling, myself included, was not anger at their comments, but pleasure in seeing the once mighty and impossibly smug fall from grace.

However, a confession: since that time I have missed listening to their infuriating commentary and forced ‘banter’ when watching football on Sky, not because I enjoyed it, far from it; I have missed it because it never failed to rile and at times incense me. In short: I have missed not being annoyed by Keys and Gray. I’ve missed the feeling of personal offence caused when they said something I knew was complete nonsense, (zonal marking anyone?).  

We all have our own guilty pleasures, I’m sure. The Daily Mail, The Jeremy Kyle Show, Simon Cowell, Fox News; these may all divide opinion, but you can be sure that those people who are annoyed most by any of the above, take the greatest pleasure in seeking out the source of their annoyance. I know I do.

If I was a practitioner of beer-mat psychology, which of course I am, I’d argue that the feeling of indignation we get from these sources allows us, in our own heads, to feel morally and intellectually superior to the spouters of these views. And to shatter the illusion somewhat, I’m sure that all of these people are aware of this. I’m sure they revel in it, they long to be the person we all love to hate and adopt the pantomime persona we all clamour for accordingly. There are those that go too far of course, those that we just hate: the Richard Littlejohns and the Robert Killroy Silks of this world. The type of people that if you were to get into a fight with and somebody said “leave it they’re not worth it”, they’d actually be correct, but you wouldn’t ‘cos they’re just that annoying.  But by and large these nasty pieces of work are in the minority.  

There are also those on the other side, the self-righteous, those whose moral compasses seemed to be tuned to a higher frequency than the rest of ours and aren’t they just determined to let the rest of us know about it.

It is this group, which argue that TalkSport shouldn’t be employing denounced sexists like Keys and Gray, who have obviously never had the pleasure of tuning into medium wave 1053.  I fear Mike Graham and Eamon Dunphy may be shunning Keys and Gray in the TalkSport canteen as we speak for believing the earth is round and being part of the political correctness gone mad brigade. 

This type of argument insults the intelligence of football fans who mostly know drivel when they hear it and can identify prejudice and discrimination for themselves. That isn’t to say TalkSport is prejudice free, it most certainly isn’t, but most listeners are aware of this fact, they listen to it for precisely the guilty pleasure reasons discussed above. Some even have a nickname for the programme in which the word “Talk” remains and “Sport” is replaced by another word beginning with “S”, though I can’t for the life of me think what…

The thing about 24 hour news channels….

 “Have people started looting yet?” the newsreader asked, barely able to contain the excitement in her voice. Behind the scenes you can practically hear the producers salivating at the prospect of footage showing televisions and furniture being liberated from shops and homes; and shown it would be, probably on repeat for 6 or 7 hours in the absence of any actual breaking news.

As Sky News speculated when looting may start and what items prospective looters may have their eye on, the same 10-15 second clip of a raucous crowd in front an Egyptian tank played on a loop. Then it cut to the latest instalment of the Sky Sports Sexism soap opera, as we found out if any of Richard Keyes’s former female class mates felt his sexist tendencies were noticeable as early as their year nine history lessons.

The problem seems to be that if you have a news channel running constantly for 24 hours a day, save for an insane amount of advert breaks, there is obviously going to be a time where the amount of news available to broadcast will fail to meet the insatiable demand of viewers.

Undeterred by this inevitability however, the modern 24 hour newsreader is adept at filling these ‘content gaps’ with a combination of speculation, insinuation and unsubstantiated gossip. There are those presenters and channels that do this well, tricking you for hours on end into beleieving you’ve actually been watching the news, for you only to realise some time later that you already knew a recession was on. And then there is the coverage of Sky Sports News on Deadline Day, as it tracks the closing stages of football’s January transfer window, which is in another league entirely. 

Sky has turned the continual broadcasting of no news into something of an art form. Each year, at the end of January scores of football fans watch the TV in a wide-eyed state of heightened alertness as “roving reporters” stand in the car parks of premier league training grounds, recounting snatches of eavesdropped conversations from unnamed sources, all the while being verbally abused by local youths. This is a most special time.

Fans of the deadline day frenzy were not let down this year. Unlike the complete dearth of activity last year, which tested SSN’s presenters to the limits of their ability: “don’t go away, something could happen at any minute!”; the 31^st January 2011 has spoilt us. There has been mandatory shirt burning, (matches and shirts provided courtesy of Sky Sports); the full spectrum of fan emotions; presenters all but foaming at the mouth, gleefully exclaiming such insights as “Fernando Torres is heading in a southerly direction” and all this taking place against the background of the deadline day clock, ticking away like some madman’s nuclear bomb.

This year sky pushed the boat out even further than usual; “the totaliser”, an ever updating number calculating the anticipated value of all prospective transfers gave the coverage a Children In Need Style feel; though this time the children were in need for multimillion pound transfer deals, as opposed to a new youth centre or drug rehabilitation clinic. The real stars of Deadline Day 2011 however, were the helicopters.  

It took just two deals to irrevocably change the preferred mode of transportation for multi-million pound premier league transfers. Whilst the fates of Andy Carroll who flew west from Newcastle to Liverpool and Fernando Torres, who flew south from Liverpool to West London were as yet undecided, it was clear that when it came to Deadline Day, road travel was a thing of the past.

Sky could only watch, grounded, like the rest of us, its cameramen looking up at the helicopters flying overhead in awe, like penguins watching fighter jets on the Falkland Islands. They may have even fallen over, we can only speculate, yet one thing is certain: for once the Sky Sports News team was left outmanoeuvred, cursing the skies.

As you can imagine, this situation cannot be allowed to continue. You can bet your life that Sky will already be in negotiations with the hard up Ministry of Defence for a full fleet of attack helicopters, which they will more than likely customise with infra-red cameras. They may even enlist Prince William to fly one, they’re certain to try. Where else is there for them to go? No, it’s the only natural progression, for the first time in its history Deadline Day 2012 will get airborne. It’ll be a cross between Children In Need and Police, Camera, Action; now who wouldn’t want to watch that?

Weight expectations

Fat people are funny. Some of them intentionally, some of them unwittingly, but face it they're funny. They either say funny things and we laugh at them, or they're a bit overweight and we consider them to be jolly larger than life characters. Some of them even do both, like John Candy or Dawn French. As his former portly self, Ricky Gervais was part of the exclusive ‘large’ group who ticked both of these boxes, becoming in the process the de facto king of British (and now American) comedy. But although still funny Ricky Gervais is sadly, no longer fat.

Good for him? Well maybe, but you can't help but feel that his new slim line look, Hollywood tan and let's be honest stupid looking sun glasses, have had a somewhat detrimental affect on his comedy. Whilst his jokes may not have suffered per se, the way in which they are received noticeably has. In previous stand up shows when Gervais poked fun at Rick Waller it seemed fair game: a marginally fat man made fun of a massively fat man and nobody felt sorry for either of them: because one was a likeable, but rich, comedian and the other was clearly a twat. Gervais's whole routine on Waller was premised on the fact that he wouldn't let himself get that fat; so no matter how cruel he got, there was a self-deprecating subtext to the whole thing. “Fat people in glass houses” was the idea that Gervais toyed with.

At the now infamous 68^th annual Golden Globes ceremony however, these same cutting one liners, were delivered with no mitigating circumstances. Gervais wasn’t fat, moreover, he wasn’t an aspiring comic looking in through the window of Hollywood lampooning what he saw, he was and is, part of that privileged group of glamorous millionaire film stars and could just as easy be on the receiving end of similar jokes had he not been hosting himself. As Tim Allen and Tom Hanks put it: “We recall when Ricky Gervais was a slightly chubby but very kind comedian. Neither of which he is now.”

This aside, this routine really wasn't as close to the bone or as shocking as many commentators would have us believe. When Gervais took a break from presenting awards part way through the ceremony, Twitter buzzed with rumours that he had been instantly sacked and would play no further part. Hardly.  Anyone who thinks the organisers of the Golden Globes were engaged in anything other than self-congratulation for  having secured Gervais's services as compère is kidding themselves. Ricky guaranteed they won't be inviting him back. Well I'm not too sure I believe that, I just hope that if they do he doesn't accept.

My concern here isn't for the feelings of the great and the good of Hollywood. To be clear, I don't feel in the in the slightest bit sorry for any of the butts of Gervais's jokes, this wasn’t exactly Bernard Manning talking about his new neighbours or Frankie Boyle quipping at Jordon’s blind son. As far as I'm concerned ridiculing multi-millionaire celebrities that take themselves far too seriously is something of a public service and I only hope that Ricky replaces that exception to the fat equals funny rule, James Cordon, at next year's sports personality of the year awards.

No, my main problem with Ricky Gervais is that he is fast joining the ranks of the Hollywood A-listers he mocks (and then drinks with afterwards). Is a Hollywood award ceremony really the forum for a risqué British stand up comedian supposedly at the business end of alternative comedy? This isn't a case of mere jealousy, more a gripe that one of our best and most innovative comedians is fast being absorbed into the ranks of the super celebrity which he used to deride. It's hard for a comedian, and an alternative comedian at that, to remain alternative when they so wilfully embrace the luxuries of mainstream success.

Becoming a victim of one’s own success is of course a familiar story and a success that I certainly wouldn’t begrudge Ricky Gervais. However, maybe we have we just seen too much Ricky Gervais recently? Ricky Gervais could be the next Jimmy Carr waiting to happen if he carries on in this vain? He was exciting and new once wasn’t he? A little bit chubby too I recall. Ricky might do well to lay off the media saturation and get back on the saturated fats for a while.

In The Ghetto (of the parliamentary constituency of Oldham East & Saddleworth)

You may be aware that on Thursday in an unfashionable corner of North West England, a by-election is taking place in the marginal seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth.

By-elections are strange happenings; attracting the attention of most of the country onto one obscure place for the re-enactment of an event which recently took place simultaneously across the entire nation. Think Coptic Christian communities at Christmas. And by virtue of the fact that we all love elections and there are none on anywhere else, reality TV exempted, by-elections attract a vastly disproportionate amount of media and political attention than they would do if they had the decency to take place at the same time as the rest of them

Once thought of as the most Lancastrian part of Yorkshire and since subsumed into Greater Manchester, the rural setting of Saddleworth is now playing host to the only show in town; as media frantically postulate on how the public will react to the three major political parties in the post-coalition climate. Big guns from all parties have been strutting there stuff round former mill towns and up and down Pennine hills campaigning for their respective candidates. Except David Cameron of course, who having briefly visited the area has decided to keep a deliberately low profile in order, some suspect, to help the Liberal Democrat’s in their hopes of winning the former labour seat. Either that or he knows he’s on a hiding to nothing. Seeing so many familiar faces in an unfashionable unfamiliar setting is reminiscent of the rare occasions when the cast of some predictable old soap, totter off to Blackpool for some off-piste seaside shenanigans. It is somewhat fitting then that the search for an MP in  Oldham East and Saddleworth has not been without its own drama.  

Former Labour MP Phil Woolas had the seat which he won by just 103 votes last May formally annulled on bonfire night 2010, following a particularly despicable election campaign in which he distributed posters suggesting the Liberal Democrat candidate Elwyn Watkins was afraid to stand up to Islamic fundamentalists and planned “to give hundreds and thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay”. The accompanying image consists of banner toting extremists forming the background to Woolas’ face with the caption: “Will you stand by Phil?” Why not just have him being crucified and do away with the subtleties altogether? And if you thought things couldn’t get any worse, in the seven months it took a judge to deem that Woolas’s poster contravened election rules, new Labour leader Ed Milliband, in what he assures us was not an ironic appointment, made Woolas Shadow Immigration Minister, citing that: “such proficiency in racial propaganda and scaremongering had not been seen since the heady days of Enoch Powell, MBE” (allegedly).

ENTER THE KING 

Sadly, the potential to exploit the infamous racial tensions of the area for personal gain will again be a factor in the by-election.

The British National Party, The English Democrats and UKIP will all stand in Oldham on predictably immigration-fixated, Eurosceptic, one dimensional tickets. Also standing will be The Pirate Party, "a political party of the digital age", whose primary interest is the legalisation of file sharing and change of the copyright laws and whilst by no means as sinister or as pernicious as their aforementioned competitors; it is noticeable that all these parties share a tendency to campaign on a single issue.   

Comparatively speaking then, the Bus Pass Elvis party’s well rounded and progressive manifesto acts as something of an antidote to divisive racial politics.  Few sane minded people would disagree with proposals to abolish Coronation Street and Eastenders, which, in the words of party leader and candidate Dave Bishop: “are depressing voters with their gloomy plots and constant whinging”, or the quite sensible commitment to “stop David Cameron axing the bus pass”. Admittedly, their instruction to voters who are “fed up with heating bills”, to “knit themselves a cardigan and shrrup moaning!” doesn’t sugar coat the pill in its delivery, but you can’t really disagree with the sentiment.  

The Bus Pass Elvis party is just one of the many guises of Dave Bishop’s Church of the Militant Elvis: “a semi-religious party which believes that Elvis is still alive and living in an old people’s home on the Lincolnshire coast somewhere between Skegness and Mablethorpe”. Whilst the party’s website fails to dispel the suspicion that this is the private project of a slightly eccentric, (if we’re being polite), Elvis fan, and now parliamentary candidate Dave Bishop; the rich tapestry of names Bishop christens his one man band are worthy of ballots. Even discounting the previously mentioned Bus Pass Elvis and Church of the Militant Elvis, the party still lists as its other monikers as; Elvis Turns Green Party, Grumpy Old Elvis Party, Elvis & The Yeti Himalayan Preservation Party, Militant Elvis Anti-Tesco Popular Front; and the quite brilliant, Elvis Defence League.  

Despite its many incarnations however, the clever money is on Labour to secure Oldham East and Saddleworth by a greater margin than last time. Perhaps the real losers then are the Monster Raving Loony Party, (also competing); who it would seem can no longer rely on the vote of people who tick the box next to the party with the daftest name on the ballet paper. Saying that though, it would seem that those who tend to choose their political party based on name alone are also those least likely to vote, if the most recent of the paltry 13 comments* on the party’s website, is anything to go by:

“I live in Saddleworth, and I’ll tell you what. IF I get back from work in time, and IF I can be bothered getting up off my fat arse, I’ll be voting Bus Pass Elvis. Oh yes”

* Yes, I am well aware of the irony here thanks.

Which future suits ya?

It is 2011, which to those in the past would have sounded very futuristic indeed. Much more futuristic than the positively prehistoric sounding 1984, which was the year that George Orwell set his vision of a dystopian totalitarian Britain, and quite possibly the date which film director George Miller had in mind when he opened Mad Max with the words: “a few years from now”.

Yes popular culture has been telling us for as long as we’ve been listening that the future is not going to for the faint hearted, and now it seems that the Prime Minister is getting in on the act, preparing us for what he predicts will be “a difficult year” in his New Year’s message. Cheers Dave. Don’t be fooled by the “bright future ahead” sound bite, that’s really just a smokescreen, what Dave is really trying to tell us here is that we’re screwed, well and truly. The future isn’t bright, it’s shite, and the sooner we realise that the better. This news may depress some, causing them to go down the existentialist, ‘what’s the point to it all’ root, but to these people I’d advise get a grip and don’t despair just yet; we’re yet to find out exactly what type of shite the future will be. That sounds like fun doesn’t it?

Well it can go one of two ways: society will either be run by protein pill munching, jumpsuit wearing, totalitarian nut jobs, in which the draconian rule of law is mercilessly administered, (think Logan’s Run, The Island, Equilibrium); or there will be a full on post apocalyptic free for all (presumably following the breakdown of the aforementioned society), in which oil crazed, leather clad mercenaries form into vigilante groups and rape and pillage there way across vast wastelands, a la The Road, Waterwold. Clearly, both are not without their respective charms and you could do worse than allow your fashion preferences to determine your support for either one of these future civilizations. Does stubble suit you? Are you fond of wearing fur, particularly that which you have skinned yourself, possibly from the carcass of a looter? Then fears of nuclear war should not concern you. Likewise, if figure hugging polyester jump suits are your thing and stainless steel chic your décor of choice, you may well find yourself voting for parties who advocate the abolition of many of our civil liberties in the near future.    

Come to think of it, our different attributes, predilections and experiences may predispose us more to one of these brave new worlds than the other. Take employment for example, the self-employed, particularly those practically skilled such as tradesmen, are likely to be much in demand in a world devastated by war and anarchy and may also appreciate the increased freedom offered by a society completely absent of authority figures. On the contrary, office workers and technocrats with a tendency to micro-manage, may find that a regime which intrudes into every facet of peoples lives really plays to their strengths.  

Outdoorsy types would most likely welcome a lifestyle which provided more opportunities for rambling across deserted cities in which the inevitable scavenging for medical supplies and safe drinking water would be sure to appeal to their sense of adventure. However those that are easily sunburnt, with a penchant for minimalistic interior design, a strong desire to get their five portions fruit and veg each day and an appreciation for advanced surveillance technology will be hoping things pan out rather differently.  

So hoarders start hoarding and informers informing, and with a bit of luck austerity Britain will deliver the 2011 you’ve been waiting for.

Happy New Year.