Anyhow. I’m not claiming five quid a month is insignificant: it’s more than many can afford. But in this case it’s bloody cheap for what it gets you. The problem for Spotify is that no one wants to pay for anything they access via a computer – and when they do, there’s a permanent level of resentment bubbling just under the surface. Hence the anger about ‘only’ getting ten hours of free music.
Look at the App Store. Read the reviews of novelty games costing 59p. Lots of slaggings – which is fair enough when you’re actively warning other users not to bother shelling out for something substandard. But they often don’t stop there. In some cases, people insist the developers should be jailed for fraud, just because there weren’t enough levels for their liking. I once read an absolutely scathing one-star review in which the author bitterly complained that a game had only kept them entertained for four hours.
FOUR HOURS? FOR 59P? AND YOU’RE ANGRY ENOUGH TO WRITE AN ESSAY ABOUT IT? ON YOUR £400 IPHONE? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND?
Yes. Of course they have. Because it’s human nature. Like a runner who fetches us cans of drink when we’re thirsty, technology has left us hopelessly spoiled. We whine like disappointed emperors the moment it does anything other than pander to our every whim. If the internet gave free backrubs, people would complain when it stopped because its thumbs were sore.
I ranted about precisely this on Twitter the other day – using that precise line about back rubs – and a couple of people told me to shut up because I was annoying them. Since Twitter is a) free and b) only displays commentary from those you chose to follow, this, too, is madness – like tailing someone down the street only to complain about the tune they’ve chosen to hum.
And even now, because these words too will appear on the internet, I know someone, somewhere, will be formulating a complaint in their head because I’ve reused my ‘free internet back rubs’ tweet in this article. They’d read it on Twitter last week, and now they’re dismayed to have to read it on their computer again today. Your Majesty is displeased. I’ve let myself down but more importantly, I’ve let them down. As has everything that provides anything other than perpetual complimentary delight.
And having written that, at home, alone, I’m off down the shops. To get a can of Coke. Assuming I can remember how.
If the Daily Mail is so worried about the sexualisation of children, all they have to do is hit ‘delete’
12/06/2011
Hey you – what are you doing to halt the sexualisation of children? We know it’s happening. It must be. It’s in the papers and on the news all the time, usually accompanied by a photograph of a kiddy-size T-shirt with ‘Future Pornstar’ on it or a padded bikini designed for eight-year-olds. What next? Lapdancing poles for foetuses? Jesus. What can we do about it? Easy: pretend sex simply doesn’t exist. Like the Tooth Fairy myth, but in reverse. Next time a child asks you where babies come from, just shrug, then ask them what a ‘baby’ is.
I don’t have a child, but I was one once (still am, come to think of it). It was different in my day. Sexual imagery wasn’t shoved in your face, unless you watched TV or looked at a magazine or newspaper or walked past a billboard advertising absolutely anything.
The rudest imagery appeared in schools – scrawled in the margins of exercise books. That iconic schoolboy’s doodle – the puerile ‘spunking knob’ – how did we know what that looked like? It’s like a cave painting symbolising not fertility, but gleeful stupidity; an image hard-wired into the mind of every sniggering boy in Britain. Everyone smiles inside when they see the spunking knob scrawled in the dust on the back of a van, or scribbled on a poster. Is it a global phenomenon? Strikes me as inherently British. It should’ve been our logo for the 2012 Olympics.
But I digress. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that ‘saucy and sexist’ imagery abounded when I was a kiddywink. Legs & Co on Top of the Pops. Barbara Windsor losing her top in Carry On Camping. When I was about seven, I loved the animated ‘Captain Kremmen’ sequences from Kenny Everett’s original ITV show, partly because they included a character called ‘Carla’ who was an insanely buxom cross between Lieutenant Uhura and Marilyn Monroe: probably my first TV crush. The cartoon was jam-packed with double-entendres, which zoomed over my head, but there was no mistaking Carla’s, um, impact.
Generally, the early TV and films I encountered depicted ‘sexy women’ as non-threatening airheads (except when attempting to seduce Kenneth Williams for comic effect), while sex in general was discussed with a nudge, a wink and an accompanying swannee whistle. Come to think of it, that’s another mystery: is there a less sexy noise than the swannee whistle? How did that become the default acoustic signifier for ‘erecting penis’ or ‘rude insertion’? Imagine the sound effects they’d use in a modern hardcore version of a Carry On film. It’d probably end with a spluttering duck call.
As for actual porn – the closest you got to that was finding a discarded copy of Mayfair in a hedge near a road, which would then be circulated among all the pre-pubescents in the vicinity like a secret dossier. There was an implicit understanding that this material was not aimed at us, but rather at the lorry driver who’d lobbed it into the hedge on his way home. Thankfully, it never occurred to any of us to contemplate what he’d probably been doing while ‘reading’ it. We genuinely believed the pages were stuck together because the magazine had been rained on.
Innocent times. I’d hate to be an adolescent today, with the internet providing a bottomless filthpit to gawp at. How in God’s name are they supposed to focus on exams? Or even eating, come to that?
But apart from the net, we’re worried when the likes of Beyoncé prance about in provocative outfits, because some little girls try to copy them. I can’t work out if that’s better, worse, or essentially the same as me pretending I was James Bond machine-gunning henchmen as a child. Beyoncé, at least, seems tougher than Bond ever did.
The Daily Mail, however, isn’t a fence-sitting wuss like me. Last year, outraged by Christina Aguilera and Rihanna’s raunchy pre-watershed dancing on The X Factor, it ran a fuming article accompanied by shocking pictures of the most extreme bits, which helped fuel thousands of complaints.
Later, Ofcom agreed that the routines were ‘at the limit of acceptability’, but went on to say the images in the Mail article were ‘significantly more graphic and close-up than the material broadcast and had been taken from a different angle to the TV cameras … Readers would have been left with the impression that the programme contained significantly more graphic material than had actually been broadcast.’
The Mail wouldn’t let it lie. ‘In fact, the pictures we used were provided by ITV and The X Factor’s official photographic agency, with the exception of one screen grab of the show’s transmission’, it complained last week. That’s odd: responding to the criticism that the images hadn’t been broadcast by confirming they hadn’t been broadcast. Next they’ll be printing artists’ impressions of Adrian Chiles’s genitals and complaining they’d been spotted on Daybreak, beneath his trousers.
Still, the thrust of the Mail’s article was that Ofcom is toothless and pre-watershed TV should be less sexy. That’s its opinion, and it’s got every right to hold it.
But as I was reading the article on their website, my eye was drawn to a variety of other raunchy images running down the righthand side: Hollyoaks actress Jennifer Metcalfe ‘shows off her fuller figure in a bikini as she films Hollyoaks in Ibiza’; ‘The Saturdays hog the limelight in hotpants’; ‘Lady Gaga parades down a runway in see-through dress’; ‘Katy Perry spoofs Janet Jackson’s boob-baring “wardrobe malfunction” in new video’ … and so on, and so on. Starlets and sex, sex and starlets – all of it in plain view on the Daily Mail website which, to the best of my knowledge, has no age restrictions in place: nothing even approaching a watershed. A child as young as four could be exposed to Katy Perry’s breasts over breakfast. I bet even Russell Brand thinks that’s going a bit far.
At the time of w
riting, if you type ‘Lady Gaga’ into Google, the top result is the Mail’s ‘see-through dress’ story, full of smutty pictures. Must they fling this filth at impressionable young kids? Won’t somebody at the Mail please, for once, just think of the children?
Glasto no-show
26/06/2011
So, Glastonbury. How was yours? Mine was pretty good. I was standing just offstage when Jessie J encouraged that little girl from the crowd to join her for a duet of ‘Price Tag’. Watching the delight on their faces, I suffered an uncharacteristic fit of emotion and wept with sheer joy, crying all the fluid out of my skull in the process, which was rough on my brain: it became so desiccated and sore it hurt to think about anything other than ice cubes.
A short while later someone stuffed an unmarked pill into my hand and in my addled state, I foolishly swallowed it. Twenty minutes later my palms felt like they were made of static electricity and I couldn’t tell whether my legs were my own or someone else’s I was standing inside by mistake. Reality itself had been hacked and inverted by Lulzsec. Six hours later I lay vomiting in the mud while listening to Mumford & Sons, trying to work out which was worse.
Obviously none of the above actually happened because I didn’t go to Glastonbury. But since this is a special edition of the Guardian, with the word ‘Glastonbury’ running through it like a cheeky slogan through a stick of rock, anything non-Glastonbury would stand out like a dog in a sandwich.
At the time of writing, I’m not sure what the news in the paper will consist of, but even if there’s a nuclear war in Canada, chances are someone’ll shoehorn a Glastonbury reference into it. ‘The deadly fireball erupted with the ferocity of a million blazing suns … the world hasn’t witnessed a lightshow this spectacular since U2’s Friday headline slot at Glastonbury.’
I caught a bit of U2’s set. I don’t know if you noticed, but the BBC had a few cameras at Glastonbury this year. You could watch kiddy acts on BBC3, paunchy legends on BBC4, and mainstream brands on BBC2. U2 are so massive they stretched across both BBC2 and 4.
Prior to the act taking the stage, three separate groups of presenters threw to each other in a series of apparently random outside broadcast links, followed by a pre-recorded burst of the Vaccines, who I couldn’t be arsed getting into. This is one of the benefits of ageing. Then U2 took the stage and everybody cheered. Why?
Several years ago I wrote an article in which I pondered the mystery of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who somehow managed to be one of the biggest bands in the world despite apparently having no fans whatsoever. I based my theory, which I admit may be flawed, on personal experience: since I’d never met one person who claimed to like them, I decided the whole thing had to be a sinister con. Or possibly something to do with dark matter.
Well, U2 are the same. I’ve never met anyone claiming to be a fan. Statistically there should be millions of U2-mad individuals in Britain – so where are they? Are they hiding? Why are they hiding? What are they hiding? OK, everyone secretly likes ‘One’ and ‘The Sweetest Thing’, and ‘Stuck in a Moment’, and … hang on, I’m supposed to be taking the piss out of U2 here, so I’d better mention Bono.
I only watched about ten minutes of U2’s set because I find Bono so annoying. I’m aware this is an experience almost as universal as knowing what wearing a T-shirt feels like, but still: it’s true. He wore his trademark Bono sunglasses. I’ve become so accustomed to seeing him in them, I’ve come to believe they’re actually part of his face. At one point I thought he was sweating through his glasses, before I realised it was drizzle. Not drizzle, rain. Apparently it was raining like a tantrum in a piss factory. The sky was disrespecting Bono. For some reason, it’s funny that it rained during U2. It just is.
The following day, the screens were far sunnier, which was almost enough to cause a glimmer of jealousy until I remembered the mud. Glastonbury looks like amazing fun if you’re twenty-three and running around covered in glitter. I’m not twenty-three, I hate tents, I dislike any form of discomfort or even mild inconvenience, I prefer recorded music to live gigs and I rarely drink any more, so it’s Good But It’s Not For Me.
I wish I’d gone when I was twenty-three, but I didn’t. I was too busy lying stoned on a sofa in west London to bother upping sticks to lie stoned in a yurt in west Britain. I’ve been once, in my thirties, on behalf of the Guardian, and it was all pleasant enough, but so is jam on toast. It’s a town the size of Bath! And so is Bath.
Here was an interesting thing I discovered during Glastonbury 2011: did you know that when BBC2 goes off-air at 2 a.m., the BBC sometimes still shows Pages from Ceefax? It’s like someone’s plugged a BBC Micro into your TV. I think it was showing headlines from 1956. Incredible it still works. They probably have to type all the stories on a calculator and save them to a 3.5-inch floppy disk and upload them to Ceefax’s 128 kb memory.
Anyway: Glastonbury. Next week, more Glastonbury, unless you’re lucky and there’s a nuclear war.
We can’t go on like this
03/07/2011
By now, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the video of Ed Miliband using almost precisely the same words over and over again in an interview. If you haven’t, it’s well worth seeking out. The reporter asks him five different questions about the public sector strikes, and every time, Miliband says that he thinks the strikes are wrong while negotiations are still under way, that the government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner, and that it’s time for both sides to put aside the rhetoric and get round the negotiating table. He repeats identical phrases ad nauseam. It sounds like an interview with a satnav stuck on a roundabout. Or a novelty talking keyring with its most boring button held down. Or a character in a computer game with only one dialogue option. Or an Ed Miliband-shaped phone with an Ed Miliband-themed ringtone. Or George Osborne.
Yes, George Osborne. Because shortly after posting a link to the Miliband video online, someone drew my attention to a similar clip of Osborne dating from late last year, in which the fourteen-year-old Chancellor answers a series of different questions about the economy by reciting a single soundbite over and over, like a mantra.
This in turn reminded me of a clip I’d stumbled across during research for an episode of Newswipe, in which Alistair Darling spent five minutes repeating an identical phrase about ‘global recession’ over and over. At the time I’d figured it was a one-off. Clearly it’s not. It’s a standard gambit.
All three clips are terrifying. First you think you’re hearing things. Then you wonder whether time itself has developed hiccups. Finally you decide none of these people can possibly be human. Because they look absolutely, unequivocally insane.
And if it looks weird on tape, imagine how it felt actually being there, standing in front of them, asking the questions. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it – you can read an insider’s description of it. ITN’s Damon Green, the reporter who was putting the questions to Miliband, has written an entertaining and very illuminating behind-the-curtain blogpost about the experience.
The first interesting thing is just how twatty the Miliband PR handlers appear to have been, demanding their man be positioned ‘in front of his bookcase, with his family photos over his left shoulder’, and insisting on checking the shot themselves, like a trio of dull Stanley Kubricks. (Interestingly, Green also notes that David Cameron’s handlers apparently ‘never let him be filmed in front of anything expensive, ornate, or strikingly Etonian’. Presumably for similar reasons they also forbid him to be photographed in front of heartless chunks of moneyed shit.)
Anyway, after posing several questions only to receive oblivious identikit responses from Miliband, Green says: ‘I began getting twinges of what I can only describe as existential doubt.’ By the end he wanted to ask him: ‘What is the world’s fastest fish?’, just to throw him off-stride. (Kudos to Green for a) being funny and b) describing how weird the Miliband encounter actually felt. Not usually a political correspondent, it was a new experience for
him.)
The reason for the Speak-and-Spell tactic is obvious: in all three cases (Miliband, Osborne, Darling) the PR handler responsible must have figured that since the interview would be whittled down to one ten-second soundbite for that evening’s news bulletins, and since they didn’t want to risk their man saying anything ill-advised or vaguely interesting, they might as well merely ignore all the questions and impersonate an iPod with just one track on it. What’s unusual is that it’s taken until now for one of these unedited interviews to go a bit viral. The Darling interview took place at least two years ago. The BBC News site often plays host to what amount to unedited rushes, which are sometimes more instructive than a final packaged report. As far as I can tell, the ‘Miliband loop’, as it shall now be known, first materialised there (despite being conducted by an ITN reporter, it was a ‘pool’ interview for all channels to use). The BBC site is also where the Osborne and Darling clips ended up. In all three cases they were unaccompanied by any comment about the repetitive lunacy contained within. No ‘WARNING: WATCHING THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU FEEL A BIT MAD.’ None of that.
What this tells you is that many people working in TV news have grown so accustomed to seeing tapes in which politicians blankly replicate a single phrase as if they’re summoning Candyman, it no longer strikes them as unusual.
But it is unusual: bloody unusual. You might say it symbolises everything that’s wrong with everything. The modern world suffers from a cavernous reality deficit. You know it, I know it. Even ‘they’ know it. Reciting the same line over and over like a Countryfile presenter practising a piece to camera, Miliband must have felt twice as mad as Green. Two men locked in a shared hallucination while the camera rolled.
It’s no surprise that politicians gabble pre-scripted taglines in order to dodge awkward questions and avoid having off-the-cuff comments inflated into a full-blown gaffe. And it’s no surprise the media routinely colludes in this surreal pantomime. But it’s only when you stand back and watch the rushes that you see how crazy the situation has become. Honestly, it gives you vertigo.
I can make you hate Page 25
