Flicky-clicky! The Art of Intolerance.

The last couple of posts have been very writer-centric. I may have already alienated folks. Now I reckon I'll alienate a couple more. Now, how can I do that?

Television!

It's a love/hate relationship I've had since I was young.  Like most people of my generation, I suppose, but being the introverted antisocial troll that I was, I took it a bit further.  I won't go into just how insular I was, you might cry and I don't want anyone getting their keyboard all soggy on my account.

As I've got older though, I haven't watched quite as much television.  Other diversions have vied for my attention: computer games, writing, reading, going out to (hey look at that, finally!) socialise and, of course, women.  But I always go back, quite often to disappointment and repeats.

My current deep disappointment is aimed at programmes like Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex.  These are programmes that I'm put off of the moment I see trailers for them, as they look like the most vapidly lazy programming.  They all centre around the worst that humanity has to offer, which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the feeling that the characters (because let's all be honest here, that's what they are, there aren't any real people, just actors looking for an easy break) are being held up as role models.  Now, I can't say for certain (and I'm not some big city lawyer), but I'm sure that the original intent was to mock these orange caricatures.  Instead what we have is a world in which Snooki (urg, can't people see the producers are taking the piss?) has a lucrative book deal.  Yes, a woman who is supposed to look and act like she has trouble reciting the alphabet has a book deal, and I can't get la- er, published*.

Yeah.  It annoys me.  They clog up the airwaves with as much mediocrity as soap operas.  We all know the reason for it, smart arse.  I know why I don't like having my toe crushed by a mallet, doesn't change my opinion on it.

Another kind of 'reality' television that I have less intolerance for are cookery programmes (take a look at this for more on my cookery programme fascination).  I can hear you smirking, fucko.  Nothing wrong with enjoying cooking and eating.  It's life enriching.  You should think about that the next time you're choking down a sausage supper with enough cholesterol to clog the London Underground Central Line.

But, in this, dear reader I have my prejudices.  Let us take the sainted (or at least ordained) Nigella Lawson.  I used to quite like Nigella as a programme host, outside of the weird, fetishy sexualisation (and that her father is a Tory and she followed suit, boo!  Hiss!) of food she seemed quite personable.  Then I started noticing something, something that made me blink in slight confusion and now it makes me want to attack the TV with a fucking tenderising mallet: snobbishness.  There's always room for a bit of snobbishness in life, but not if it's presented as THE ONE TRUE PATH.  Ingredients that seem innocuous to the layman become a benighted spectre to Nigella Lawson.  Use the wrong (read: least expensive) kind of capers and pal you better have a good fuckin' excuse.  It's infuriating and quite often it's utterly arbitrary.  Use what you can use and fuck what some rich woman on the TV says.

Speaking of crazy women cooks.  My wife and I have been watching the The Little Paris Kitchen which involves woman-child eternastudent Rachel Khoo proving that she's almost mental enough to start throwing buckets of molten butter over her balcony onto any heathen who deviates a tenth of an iota from TRUE FRENCH PATISSERIE.  Seriously, this woman is bonkers.  She lives in a Paris flat that's barely large enough for an adult and runs a restaurant from her optimistically named front room.  A lot of her cooking looks rather nice, but her style gives an over-romanticised view of France and Paris in particular that doesn't quite match up to the living quarters she has.  Perhaps she's deluded or perhaps she really is happy there; all I know is I'd be gnawing my arms off because of the claustrophobia.

Or maybe I'm deluded and should step away from the remote, verrry slowly...

^*(Yes, yes, I understand that there's a demand for it.  I'm not ignorant of these things.  I'm still allowed to rail and have the opinion that it's peddling mediocrity and general human shittiness.)


Will

The record skips and goes to the start of another song.

It’s the same dreary song we’ve heard over again from the same album. All the songs sound pretty much the same; artistic integrity isn’t the point of the exercise. We all roll our eyes, sigh, grumble, shake our heads and mutter, but we get up all the same and dance along with the dreary tune because we don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. After all we don’t want people staring at us for sitting there with our arms crossed over our chests because we’re not doing what everyone else is when we neither want nor need to do it. That’s just crazy.

So, over two thirds of the way through January and we’re being thrust headlong into another round of ‘Terrorismania!’. Note the exclamation point. The exclamation point is important. The exclamation point will dance with your mother. The exclamation point will tell you things about what happened that summer in Greece. The exclamation point will stand on the twelve kittens. The exclamation point has Import.

You can call it Terrorismania! or you can call it Threat Level: Severe. It’s really all down to personal taste. One sounds like a musical in the style of ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’ or ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and is probably more apt, while the other sounds like a straight to video action film starring Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren or Steven Seagal, a film that would be really quite good if it were written with any skill or panache, but just comes off as a bunch of pyros going off with people swearing in between – or in the case of Threat Level: Severe standing around waiting for the pyros to go off and not even having the energy to swear anymore until it peters out.

The UK terrorism threat level has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. Feel the tension in the air here, people. Or don’t. This American-style scale of, ‘are we going to die in droves today’ seems to hover always around the vague bits. It could happen, but then again it might not. This upping of the heat doesn’t seem to mean anything practical for the day-to-day running of the country.

It’s all a little bit Mystic Meg really. Cold reading the country. There could be terrorists plotting something heinous, somewhere in the world right now and they’re probably right, but in general the people planning them are a combination of mad and incompetent, and we don’t ever see them. Unless they decide to become politicians in which case their careers sky rocket.

Now the general theory – denied by MI6, but used by the media and politicians – is that this is in response to the lone clod who failed to blow himself and a planeload of other travellers up in Detroit on Christmas last year (2009 for you future people).

Wait a second. Because a man who seems to have acted alone didn’t manage to do anything beyond scare the shit out of a plane load of people, the UK is expecting some kind of terrorist attack. There’s an interesting jump of logic. It’s almost like saying that nasty dog down the road bit Mister Robertson, all the dogs in the world must be preparing to overthrow mankind!

Never mind that a renegade group of the IRA have been twitching for the last few months, a man with incendiary underpants didn’t do anything was caught on a plane, we must do something! Let’s see, we’ll do a few token things and try to push through a full-body x-ray machine that wouldn’t have detected anything the Nigerian guy was carrying, but will have the benefit of humiliating anyone wanting to travel out of the country!

I am not reassured. I don’t think many people are. I (along with most of the country again) am not that intimidated either.

If it’s going to be Threat Level: Severe I at least want to wake up in the morning with a man (for some reason with a French accent, I don’t know why, I have no reason to believe that the French, Canadians or Belgians are particularly nasty people) sitting next to my bed pointing a gun at my head saying, “Tomorrow it could be you,” before holstering his weapon and walking out of the room. That would be a severe threat level that’s guaranteed to get my attention. Call it Threat Level: Imminent Death or don’t bother with it at all.

The Detroit thing reminds me of the attempted ‘bombing’ of Glasgow Airport a couple of years ago. Another bungled attack that did nothing more than show that the medical students involved were retarded and best off out of the medical profession and made a ned a celebrity for kicking a man who was on fire. It was inspiring, it really was. Apart from the fact that all that would have happened in the worst case scenario would have been a bit of property damage and the two men would have been, at the most, wounded – you see they were clever (in a vicious way) in wrapping the propane canisters up with ball bearings, but they didn’t realise that those tanks are designed to resist high temperatures and when they do explode they tear instead of shattering. Idiots.

What we got then was Gordon Brown (all nice and shiny from the recent hand-over of power) telling us to be more vigilant, essentially that there was a terrorist on every street corner waiting to blow up. A smart move by someone in power.

So in a time of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, the people in charge of the country have decided, in their infinite wisdom to concentrate on attempting to wind the populace up and be the heroes of the hour by shuffling papers and throwing some new terms at us. Oo, I feel about as protected as a cocktail sausage at a Tory Party Conference.

We’d be much happier if you just did your job and helped people back into work and into some kind of comfort.

So let’s get ready to put the record on the turntable one more time; I feel like a bit of a boogie.


Will