Showing posts with label Television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Television. Show all posts
A graph makes Nicky Morgan look even more surprised than usual
On last night's Newsnight Evan Davis ambushed Nicky Morgan with the facts about who will suffer from the government's attempts to reduce the deficit.
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"As anyone involved in the fight to save London’s council housing knows, the boroughs at the forefront of the social cleansing of our city over the last fifteen years are Labour boroughs." Architects for Social Housing are not taken in by Labour's rhetoric.
Michael Gerson says the Republicans are staining themselves by sticking with Donald Trump.
Exposure to nature makes people happy and could cut mental health inequalities between the rich and poor, argues Natasha Gilbert.
The decline of Ricky Gervais is itemised by Joe Bish.
Dirty Feed shows that the first episode of Fawlty Towers was originally filmed as a pilot. That version differs significantly from the broadcast version: "In the reshot section, Danny’s grapefruit is far larger and has a cherry on top, compared to the rather meagre offer on display once we cut to the wide shot." Such obsession is to be applauded.
Why is the BBC convinced that everyone loves Manchester United?
I generally listen to the repeat of Choral Evensong on Radio 3. The music is sublime and the Old Testament lessons often barking mad, so it's great entertainment all round.
Today, after it was over, I switched to Five Live to see how Spurs were getting on in their attempt to catch Leicester City.
But Spurs were not on Five Live. You needed their Sports Extra channel to listen to that game. Five Live itself had the Manchester derby - the battle for fourth place, if you are being generous.
This is of a pattern with the BBC's conviction that everyone in the country loves Manchester United.
I can even recall Match of the Day deciding,n during the club's prime under Alex Ferguson, that every goal in its Goal of the Year competition should be from a United player. How other clubs' fans loved that!
There was a short period when Chelsea were cruising to their second title during Jose Mourinho's first coming when the BBC recognised that we were the leading team in the country. You could rely on Chelsea being the commentary game on Five Live and being first on Match of the Day.
Then we slipped a little. The BBC immediately pounced and restored Manchester United to first place in its affections.
Why this obsession? Maybe it's half-memories of the Munich disaster or of United winning the European Cup in 1968.
More likely it is because BBC staff live in Surrey like so many of the club's fans.
Al Murray is the great nephew of Stephen Murray
But our Trivial Fact of the Week reveals that he is also the great nephew of the actor Stephen Murray.
A young person writes: Who was Stephen Murray?
Only the star of the radio comedy The Navy Lark, Sir Francis Walsingham to Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R on television and star of such post-war films as London Belongs to Me and The Magnet.
Cliff Michelmore at Aberfan
Cliff Michelmore belonged to the generation that pioneered television presentation and still possessed a certain decency and innocence about the medium.
His heyday fell just before the point where my memories of television begin, but I do recall people like his Tonight Fyfe Robertson. He gave the impression that he did not realise he was on television or at least that he was constantly surprised to find he was.
The 50th anniversary of Aberfan, the disaster in which a coal waste tip slid down the hillside and engulfed a primary school, falls on 21 October this year. In many ways it was the first televised disaster, and I do just remember it.
This is Cliff Michelmore's report from the scene on the evening of that dreadful day.
Stewart Lee can be funny about Islamophobia
Those of us who ground our way through Thursday's Comedy Vehicle will be relieved to see this video.
It shows Stewart Lee using the same material and being funny.
Stewart Lee on his new series of Comedy Vehicle
We have seen Stewart Lee talking to Will Self and Alexei Sayle.
Here he is being interviewed by The Quietus:
Have you noticed a similar change happening in comedy?
SL: I have. If you went to the alternative night with all the weird acts, which 25 years ago was downstairs at the Market Tavern on Islington Green on Essex Road, you'd see Simon Munnery who is the son of a plumber. Or Johnny Vegas, who is not a member of the upper classes.
The same thing now, which is the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society at the New Red Lion, is a very good night, but there's a higher proportion of people whose parents bought them a flat. Inevitably, because you can't do that sort of stuff that doesn't pay, unless you've got some sort of fallback position.The interviewer, Simon Price, takes Lee Terribly Seriously, but then maybe we should.
Stewart Lee talks to Alexei Sayle
The new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts at 10 this evening on BBC2.
While we are waiting, here he is interviewing Alexei Sayle about Thatcher Stole My Trousers, the latter's second volume of memoirs .
Something the two have in common is that, rather than flatter it like lesser left-wing comedians, they attack their audience's view of the world.
Jordan: Rule Britannia
When I was young a top British recording star would be named to sing for us at Eurovision, but the choice of song was left to a public vote. In those days, incidentally, voting involved sending a postcard.
This year we have the public vote back, but no stars. Joe and Jake (me neither) will be singing 'You're Not Alone' for us in Sweden in May.
This video would have been my choice.
It comes from Derek Jarman's 1978 film Jubilee, which I saw at a university film club that year. (Those were the days when teenagers went to university to encounter dangerous new ideas, not demanding that they be protected from them.) It has not been much seen since, but deserves a viewing if only as a historical curiosity - I am going to order the DVD.
Stuart Jeffries once described Jubilee thus:
The film's framing device has Queen Elizabeth I consulting her court astrologer Dr John Dee (played by Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O'Brien). Dee shows his queen a vision of her realm 400 years hence. It is over-run by roving gangs of girl punks and thuggish police. Dorset has become a fascist state within a state where the rich luxuriate behind barbed wire. The old Queen Elizabeth (played by Jenny Runacre) is horrified.
It's likely that Elizabeth II, whose silver jubilee celebrations are mocked in the film's ironic title, wouldn't have cared for Jarman's vision of her kingdom either. She especially wouldn't have liked Jordan dressed as a punk Britannia, miming to a souped-up reggae version of Rule Britannia and lifting her skirt to show her bum.
In a sense, Jarman was expressing similar nihilistic views to those of Johnny Rotten in God Save the Queen. Neither believed in the English disease that the political philosopher of Britain's decline Tom Nairn described as "the glamour of backwardness". Jarman told the Guardian's Nicholas de Jongh in February 1978: "We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution - they no longer ring true."You will also read more about Jordan in that article. Here real name is Pamela Rooke and her character in Jubilee is called Amyl Nitrate. She was interviewed in the Guardian in 2004.
I don't know what the Europeans would make of it, but combining punk and patriotism ticks a lot of British boxes.
Stewart Lee and Will Self
Good news. A new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2 at 10pm on Thursday 3 March.
Stewart Lee is interviewed on the Guardian website today (and in tomorrow's paper?) by Will Self:
On stage, Lee is apparently an embittered, envious, self-lacerating man, caught in a ferocious double-bind: if he’s unsuccessful it’s because his audience are stupid shits who don’t get his jokes; and if he’s successful it’s because he’s a stupid shit churning out jokes that confirm his audience in their prejudices. So convincing is this act – if indeed it is an act – that I became intrigued: was the “real” Lee quite as prickly as his performance persona? In order to find out I asked him over for a serious sit-down.It's good stuff, but I wish someone would tell Self to stop saying "self-reflexive".
Geordie: All Because of You
Last Friday BBC4 broadcast a documentary on The Easybeats to AC/DC: The Story of Aussie Rock. You can watch it for on BBC iPlayer for the next three weeks.
You can see The Easybeats on this blog, and the documentary was so thorough that you saw Angus Young when he was in long trousers.
AC/DC's first lead singer was Bon Scott, who was found dead in his car in East Dulwich in 1980. The Guardian once did its best to turn it into a mystery along the lines of Brian Jones' death, but the cause was clearly acute alcohol poisoning.
Scott's replacement in AC/DC was Brian Johnson. Before AC/DC he was with the British band Geordie.
This was there most successful single, reaching no. 6 in the British singles chart early in 1973. It has lasted better than a lot of the other hits of the period.
An open letter to Stephen Fry on mental health
Bentall writes:
Conventional psychiatry tends to decontextualise psychiatric disorders, seeing them as discrete brain conditions that are largely genetically determined and barely influenced by the slings and arrows of misfortune, and it was this perspective that was uniquely presented in your recent programme The not so secret life of a manic depressive ten years on.
According to this ‘brain conditions’ view, psychiatric disorders occur largely out of the blue in individuals who are genetically vulnerable, and the only appropriate response is to find the right medication. Even then, it is usually assumed that severe mental illnesses are life long conditions that can only be managed by continuous treatment.
However, research into severe mental illness conducted over the last twenty years (not only by me, although I have contributed) tells a more complex story.He goes on:
Of course genes play a role in making some people more vulnerable to psychiatric disorder than others, but the latest research in molecular genetics challenges simplistic assumptions about ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘bipolar disorder’ being primarily genetic conditions.
The genetic risk appears to be shared across a wide range of diagnostic groupings – the same genes are involved when people are diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD and even, in some cases, autism.
More importantly, genetic risk is widely distributed in the population with hundreds, possibly thousands of genes involved, each conferring a tiny increase in risk.By contrast:
Recent epidemiological studies have pointed to a wide range of social and environmental factors that increase the risk of mental ill health, some of which I am guessing you may be familiar with from personal experience.
These include poverty in childhood and early exposure to urban environments; migration and belonging to an ethnic minority (probably not problems encountered by most public school boys in the early 1970s) but also early separation from parents; childhood sexual, physical and emotional abuse; and bullying in schools. In each of these cases, the evidence of link with future psychiatric disorder is very strong indeed – at least as strong as the genetic evidence ...
And of course, there are a myriad of adult adversities that also contribute to mental ill health (debt, unhappy marriages, excessively demanding work environments and the threat of unemployment, to name but a few). Arguably, the biggest cause of human misery is miserable relationships with other people, conducted in miserable circumstances.I have seen other psychologists making the same criticism of programmes in the In the Mind season.
If you want to know more about Richard Bentall's research you can watch a video I posted here in 2013.
He also gave an engaging interview to The Psychologist a couple of years before that.
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"According to a 2015 Prison Reform Trust review, children and young people who are, or have been, in care were more than five times more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. The most recent inspection report of Medway in 2014, which houses 12 to 17-year-olds who have been remanded or sentenced to detention, found 45% of youngsters there had care histories." Jameel Hadi writes on institutional abuse.
Patrick Barkham reports that more than 10% of children in England haven’t been to a natural environment in past 12 months.
"Trees in Leicester reduce concentrations of road traffic emissions in the city by up to 7% and have a “regionally beneficial impact on air quality”, results from an academic research project have found." Important (and more widely applicable) research from Michael Holder.
Twitter just killed its own product, says Austin Rathe.
Curious British Telly on the short Blue Peter career of Michael Sundin.
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"Orwell was far more interested, as Corbyn has been far more interested, in speaking truth to power than in holding office. His loyalty was to the movement, or at least the idea of the movement, not to MPs or the front bench, which he rarely mentioned." Robert Colls (who taught me on my Masters course many years ago) on what Jeremy Corbyn can learn from George Orwell.
David Hencke explains how Chris Grayling's attempt to sell prison expertise to regimes with appalling judicial systems like Saudi Arabia and Oman cost the taxpayer over £1m. If he were a councillor he would be surcharged.
Mad to be Normal is a film on the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing currently in production. Caron Lindsay finds a Lib Dem connection.
Peter Bebergal is interviewed by Dangerous Minds about his new book Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll.
"“And Ukraine just wanted to be absolutely sure that the oil and the electricity rolls through." BuzzFeed remembers 19 Eurovision moments from Terry Wogan.
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Andrew Neil's press gang
Andrew Neil's press gang
To Westminster for a round of meetings. In the evening I repair to a quaint back-street hostelry with exposed beams, dimpled window glass and exposed, dimpled barmaids. The atmosphere is tense: word has got about that the press gang is on the prowl. Sure enough, the door bursts open and a group of men with lanterns and tricorn hats hurries in. The Shadow Minister for Fish cowers under the table, but they see him, drag him out and bear him away.
“What will become of him?” I ask the landlady. “Mark my words,” she says, “they’ll take him to the dungeons beneath Broadcasting House, put the frighteners on him and ply him with Blue Nun. The next thing you know he’ll be on Daily Politics resigning from the Labour front bench.”
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary
Wellington Womble: Rainmaker
On I promised a Sunday music choice inspired by the great drought of 1976. And here it is.
The other day I was followed on Twitter by Mike Batt, the man behind The Wombles. They were the biggest selling British band of 1974 - and if you look at what else was in the charts that year, you can see why.
By 1976 drugs, Bungo's relationship with a Japanese conceptual artist and the inevitable differences over musical direction had caused the furry creatures to fall out with one another.
The result was that Wellington Womble tried a solo career with a song called Rainmaker. It turns out not be a cover of the Traffic song but a topical song inspired by the drought.
Sadly, it was not a hit.
But the exciting news is that The Wombles are coming back.
Row over the 'African grave' at Bishop's Castle
There are some remarkable graves in Bishop's Castle churchyard in Shropshire.
One of them, as this video from the Shropshire Star shows, is currently the cause of controversy:
A wood and perspex cover protecting the Grade II-listed “African grave” may have to be removed as it does not have permission to be there.
But the locals who made the cover and put it there to save the 200-year-old monument say action needs to be taken now to stop it eroding further.
The grave belongs to a man only identified as ID, who is said to be a native of Africa who died in Bishop’s Castle on September 9 1801.Such monuments have to be looked after, but the locals say the cover is only temporary.
It is hard not to see this incident as a new Ealing Comedy. An inspector, perhaps played by Raymond Huntley, is dispatched to Shropshire to call the locals to heel.
Once there he is plied with beer from The Three Tuns, shown the wrong churchyard and sent back to Whitehall defeated.
And this part of Shropshire is one of the few places in England where you can still imagine this happening.
I recently saw an old episode of The Green, Green Grass of Home, which is set in the county. An American who had been stationed there as a serviceman decades before wanted to go round the village to see how it had changed.
"Oh it's not changed, sir," came the reply. "If anything it's more like it was now than it was then."
