Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Here come the tube-steppers

Published
by
Chris Quigley
on May 1, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

In recent years there’s been a general move towards political parties trying to use new technologies to engage citizens in ever more innovative ways. If there’s a latest web trend, you can bet your shirt that politicians will be all over it like a political rash. In the London mayoral elections we’ve seen Brian Paddick Twittering, Boris rally his legions on Facebook, and all candidates push their latest campaign films on YouTube.

Yet beyond these fairly mainstream campaign activities, there are signs of underhand new media tactics. In previous campaigns such moves would usually go unnoticed, but you can now use monitoring services like Opinion Tracker (which I set up) to monitor what people are doing and saying across the internet.

Possibly the most interesting under-the-radar campaign activity to surface in this year’s campaign is the rise of what I call “Tube-stepping.” Tube-stepping is a cross between the old journalistic trick of doorstepping and the new Asbo-generation technique of “happy-slapping,” and involves “members of the public” (actually they usually seem to be largely party activists) asking candidates difficult questions, catching their stuttering responses on a video phone and then posting these films on YouTube for the world to see (and laugh at).

So far Boris’s activists seem to be most adept at tube-stepping, with a whole campaign being orchestrated by a group calling itself Comrade Fidel. Team Ken have also had a go, taking a more conventional approach.

Looking at the numbers of views each of the films have got, I’m not sure tube-stepping is going to have much effect in this election. But no doubt we’ll be see bigger and better campaigns in the future.

Making it up

Published
by
William Davies
on April 25, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

I had gone for over two years without regularly attending an office, but it took a mere six weeks for office culture to ensnare my grammar all over again. During a phone call earlier this week, I was horrified to discover the following words coming out of my mouth: “so we just need to confirm up a few things.” Confirm up? UP?? A cold sweat ensued. Shaken, I mumbled some hasty apologies and said I’d call back later.

What was the “up” doing in this sentence? Sitting there at the back end of a verb, it’s as embarrassing and unnecessary as the spoiler on the boot of a Ford Escort. During my life as a PhD student, I regularly get asked if I’m “writing up” yet, to which I grumpily reply that I am about to “start writing” or have “some writing to do.” I never expected to find myself scattering “ups” in this way.

But lest we forget: “please park up over there”, “time to finish up now please”, “I’m now heading up this organisation”, “here’s the membership application to get you joined up”, “we’ll firm up the details” and so on. Of course there are also more legitimate “ups” in circulation - “cashing up”, “adding up”, “washing up”, “sweeping up”, “clearing up”… funny how there are so many which relate to cleanliness. Which may be precisely the point. The metaphor that arises when “up” crops up is of leaves being efficiently swept into a pile, put into bags, then disposed of. A PhD needs “writing up”, only because one assumes that it is a hellish mess of ideas and research that has become scattered over time, and needs gathering, ordering and disposing of.

The flipside of the sweeping metaphor, however, is that the job is never really done. Sweeping leaves is actually a fairly pointless exercise, in the broader scheme of things, as the leaves will always come back. “I’ve swept the leaves” has a Beckettian ring to it, a sense of its own futility. Work has been done, but without constituting a job being done. By comparison, “I’ve swept up the leaves” represents a minor triumph. Some semblance of finality has been achieved, momentarily ignoring the eventual defeat that the sweeper will suffer at the hands of the leaves.

So it is with office work. Offices suffer from too many intransitive verbs - we talk, meet, work, sit - and not enough full stops. A veneer of completion has to be introduced periodically, for fear that time will otherwise just pass and pass. When is something actually “confirmed”? Difficult to say. Far easier to think that it might instead be “confirmed up” once and for all, only for the next act of confirmation to begin and end. And with that, I’ll shut up.

Chess chumps

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 2, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

The acid test for any April Fool’s gag in the media is whether it manages to convince any other publication to write about it. And on that count, this year’s haul was rather feeble (although the BBC’s “flying penguins” video was at least very well done). In fact, with the exception of my colleague Tom Chatfield’s erudite post below on the origins of the practice, which has ensnared one commenter so far, the only April Fool I’ve come across that has evidently fooled anyone is this gem at ChessBase.com. The website claimed yesterday to have received copies of the letters sent by the late Bobby Fischer during his long period of self-imposed exile to other chess luminaries (and although I’ve given the game away, it’s definitely worth a look). Thanks to the usually highly authoritative Marginal Revolution, which this morning directed me to the Fischer article before hastily withdrawing its recommendation.

Clinton demonology

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on March 10, 2008
in Uncategorized and United States
. 4 Comments

Andrew Sullivan’s lead piece in the Sunday Times yesterday — “The Clintons, a horror film that never ends” —picked up on an idea that has gained swift currency in the past week: that Hillary Clinton is not just cold, calculating and impersonal, but she is in fact a creature of the Undead.

It’s a view that Christopher Hitchens certainly subscribes to: (watch the great public intellectual compare the Clintons to “zombies, vampires and werewolves” on the Morning Joe talkshow).

And another youtube clip from a slick impressario who calls himself ‘Reihan’ makes the case even more watertight.

While Sullivan’s marvellous thesis deserves to be read in full, here is the crux of it:

“It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win.”

Of course, all this demonology will probably play straight into Clinton’s hand—it won’t be long before we’re hearing the familiar “the boys are ganging up on me” refrain. Inevitably she will try and convert this into sympathy votes—we might even expect some more tears, to prove to us that she really is human after all, and not some ghoulish host who sleeps in a grave.

Of course, this isn’t a case of the “boys ganging up on her” at all. It was Samantha Power who coined that memorable epithet: “monster.” Meanwhile Hitchens explicitly analogises the Clintons (plural) and doesn’t exactly cheerlead for Obama either (in the same interview, he said the Illinois Senator belongs to a “dumb, nasty, ethnic rock ‘n’ roll racist church”). Sullivan’s diatribe also had an emphatically dual focus—it’s the bloodlust of both Clintons that keeps him awake at night, quivering with fear.

Do not expect this, however, to temper the howling accusations of sexism which will emit from Clinton HQ. As Hitchens puts it:

“[A]nyone who, like me, when they think about Clintons, thinks about zombies, thinks about the undead, thinks about stakes through the heart, silver bullets and so on, has just received confirmation. It’s as bad as we thought it was going to be.”

Bruce Forsyth at 80

Published
by
David Herman
on February 22, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 4 Comments

Today Bruce Forsyth is eighty. He started in showbusiness during the second world war with a song and dance act and has reinvented himself countless times. What is interesting about his career is the way it reflects shifts in British showbusiness through the mid- and late-20th century.

Forsyth belongs to that generation born in the 1920s and early 1930s (Dickie Henderson, Morecambe and Wise, the two Ronnies, Roy Castle and Des O’Connor) who started out in variety and burst into television in the late 1950s and early ’60s. His big break came, inevitably, presenting the great TV variety show, ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’ (ITV). Except for Morecambe and Wise, none of these personalities were great comedians, singers or dancers. They could do a bit of everything and had enough personality to feed the growing TV entertainment shows of the 1960s and ’70s (’Sunday Night…’, ‘The Generation Game’, The Golden Shot’). Family shows, put out at peak time on Saturdays and Sundays, these were a strange hybrid of game shows, with enough comedy and music to please the 10 million+ viewers.

The heyday of this kind of performer, complete with catchphrase (’Nice to see you…’, ‘Didn’t they do well?’, ‘Good game, good game’, ‘Bernie, the bolt’, ‘What do you think of it so far?’, ‘You can’t see the join’), was from the late 1950s to the late ’70s. It’s no coincidence that Forsyth left ‘The Generation Game’ in 1977, a year after Morecambe and Wise left the BBC for ITV. TV executives wanted something new and different. The old entertainers came under fierce attack from alternative comedians. Forsyth himself was the subject of a particularly nasty and unfunny onslaught by Peter Cook on the 1978 Derek and Clive album, ‘Ad Nauseam’ andanother from ‘Not The Nine ‘Clock News’. Forsyth continued presenting game shows on ITV through the `1980s and ’90s, and even returned to ‘The Generation Game’ for a second stint (1990-94) and then made it back to the big-time with ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ on BBC 1 (2004-), enough of a celebrity to be the subject of gags from a new generation of TV stars like Jonathan Ross.

Just as Variety gave way to TV, so song ‘n’ dance entertainers gave way to comedy. Just as the old entertainers took over TV shows in the Sixties, so comedians have taken over all kinds of factual genres in the 1990s and 2000s: travel programmes (Michael Palin and Victoria Wood), wildlife shows (Bill Oddie), drama (Lenny Henry in ‘Hope and Glory’, Dawn French in ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’), arts programmes (Griff Rhys Jones, an Omnibus on ballet presented by Jennifer Saunders), countless quiz and game shows.

Once reviled for their cosy, safe humour, love of golf and bright pullovers, Forsyth has been rediscovered by a new generation for his ability to give huge TV audiences a good time. Like Des O’Connor (now presenting ‘Countdown’), he’s still there, the last of a great generation of British entertainers, who made the transition from vaudeville and variety to TV.

An Award for the Oddest Book Title of the Year Award.

Published
by
John Kelly
on February 22, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Often I fawn in abject admiration at a very good publishing idea. Sometimes I own up to it. This is one. I am normally allergic to awards (horrible food in underground ballrooms, frocks like tents, Spitting Image old newsreaders making rentaspeeches etc.) and would normally only put on a dinner jacket for an East End boxing night, but the Bookseller’s Diagram Award for Oddest Book Title of the Year more than merits a trip to Moss Bros.

The shortlist includes such gems as ‘I was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen,’ ‘People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: from King Canute to Dr. Feelgood,’ ‘How to Write a How to Write Book,’ ‘Cheese Problems Solved’ and ‘Are Women Human?’ Regrettably, none of these titles were offered to Prospect to review. ‘If You Want Closure in your Relationship, Start With Your Legs,’ the last title on the shortlist, would certainly appeal to the sensible bluestockings who own up to reading our magazine and we often debate cheese problems, so publicists are clearly missing a trick. You can vote online for this joyous initiative and I urge you to do so.

Perhaps we can start an award for the oddest named shops that could equally be book titles. My favourites, seen on a recent trip oop north, are ‘The World of Living Fires,’ ‘The House of Shoes’ and ‘The Booze Nest.’ ‘Wig World’ on Stroud Green Road would encourage me to ‘live a little’ with its permanent 3 wigs for a tenner special offer. I can feel an Odd Book coming on . . . ‘The Folk Art of Ice Cream Vans cries out to be published’ . . .Stop me before I go to lulu.com.

Obama, race, and white emancipation

Published
by
Jonathan Power
on February 12, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

Just how “emancipated” are we white westerners? What is the acid test? Electing a black man as president of the US, or smiling weakly at the black doctor who we have just been told is going to perform a complex surgical manoeuvre on our heart?

I suspect many of us may be ready for the first, but not so sure about the second. It doesn’t seem that long ago that, on an aeroplane to India, I walked up to the cockpit to see if it really was brown men flying that great big 747. These days I fly all over Africa with all-black crews and only worry when I’m in Nigeria, not because the pilots are black but because the airline industry imposed no safety standards until recently.

Nevertheless, the fact that Barack Obama is now the frontrunner to be the next American president is a remarkable historical event, not just for him, not just for America, but for us, the white man, who for so long dominated the world and dismissed black, yellow and brown people as “coons,” “niggers” or “boys.” Only 30 or so years ago I was taken out to lunch by the op-ed editor of the New York Times, who, aware of my close association with Martin Luther King’s movement from the time when I had worked in the slums of Chicago as a volunteer, asked me if I thought that when you really got to know “them,” they were really the same as “us.”

Continue reading ‘Obama, race, and white emancipation’

The four lives of John Gray

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on February 8, 2008
in Books, Inside Prospect, Media and Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

I was somewhat surprised, perusing today’s Independent, to be confronted, in the “5-Minute Interview” slot, with a picture of the philosopher John Gray, under the headline “Not many people know that I have a wellness centre…” Begads, I thought, I certainly didn’t know that. Somehow, the idea of a wellness centre doesn’t square with my image of Gray, who is known for his apocalyptic cast of mind and his suspicion of all schemes for human advancement. Upon looking more closely, I was reassured to see that the subject of the interview was not, in fact, John Gray the philosopher, but John Gray the author of the bestselling self-help book, Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The paper had simply made a mistake, and plucked the wrong John Gray from its photo archive.

This, in fact, is a surprisingly easy mistake to make. On page 11 of the current Prospect, there’s a picture of the American writer Robert Coover, wrongly identified in the story next to which it appears as Raymond Carver. On this occasion, the fault wasn’t entirely ours: the picture agency we purchased the picture from had muddled the two men. When it comes to John Gray, the potential for confusion is all the greater because of there being so many famous (or semi-famous) men of this name. In addition to the philosopher and the self-help author, there’s also John Gray the multi-millionaire founder of the Spearmint Rhino chain of strip clubs (and husband of a former porn star), and John Gray the American Christian comedian. Which leads me to think that they should all agree to do each others’ jobs for a week, and film the result: the resulting reality TV series would surely be a huge popular hit (title, anyone?). In the absence of that happening, look out for a review by John Gray of J G Ballard’s new book in the next issue of Prospect. I’m not going to reveal which of the four John Grays we’ve commissioned, but you can probably guess.

Richard Drewett (1935-2008)

Published
by
David Herman
on February 6, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

Richard Drewett was one of the great talks and entertainment producers of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. He started out at the BBC in the 1960s, worked on ‘Late Night Line Up’ and then produced the early series of ‘Parkinson’.  In the late 1970s Drewett moved to LWT, then at its height, and worked with Barry Humphries (as Dame Edna) and Clive James, among others. Among the best programmes he made with James was an interview with Roman Polanski in a restaurant in Paris, in which the mischievous film director had a lot of fun with the more slow-footed James. Drewett and James were lured to the BBC in 1988 with the offer of their very own unit, bringing some of their more talented producers from LWT, making a fun Saturday night show (’Sarturday Night Clive’), the ‘Postcards’ travel documentaries and a short-lived series of serious talks programmes (’The Late Show With Clive James’). The key figures in the unit included Beatrice Ballard (who later revived ‘Parkionson’ on BBC1) and Elaine Bedell (former producer of ‘Start the Week’ and now a senior figure at the BBC).  The main idea behind the move was to find a way of exploiting James’ considerable range, equally at home making fun of Japanese TV shows and writing for ‘The New Yorker’. The serious side of James had not found its proper expression on TV since his early days as a presenter of ‘Cinema’, ITV’s 1960s film show. It says a lot for Drewett that he was happy to give his longtime colleague a chance to find a different voice on TV. Drewett was awarded two BAFTAs and was shortlisted for a third. Never really at home in the BBC of Birt, Yentob and Michael Jackson, Drewett formed an independent company with James and Elaine Bedell (Watchmaker) in 1994, which they subsequently sold a few years later. Drewett was funny, highly intelligent, tremendously hard-working and was one of the key figures in a kind of intelligent entertainment programme  that barely exists today on BBC 1 or ITV.  He was a delight to work with and Clive James has written a fulsome tribute in Monday’s Guardian (February 4, 2008, p33).

When is a smile not a smile?

Published
by
William Davies
on January 30, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Despite my underlying fear that much anthropology is simply bad poetry (”And then this happened; and then this happened; and then someone did this; and then I wondered whether…”) I occasionally find myself wishing I could draw on its analytical tools and insight better. Yesterday I was struck by one of our society’s most bizarre forms of micro-social exchange. I can’t say whether it is distinctly British or middle class (although it feels both), only that it needs unravelling.

I was sitting at a table in the British Library cafe reading a book (one of the nice alcove tables that everybody wants; I’ve almost witnessed Ballardian riots over who gets to sit at them) and somebody wandered over with a tray of food, and proceeded to sit at my table. On this occasion, I was high-minded enough to let it pass without violence. Once they’d sat down, I deliberately looked up from my book, they deliberately looked up from their tray, and we exchanged that specific form of rigid smile that has as little to do with smiling as possible. The eyes remain emotionless, but the corners of the mouth are raised mechanically, as if doing a split-second impression of the Joker in Batman. It is not a facial expression as such, but a transmitter of a chunk of information (them: “I’m just going to sit here and have my lunch”; me: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to deck you”).

Erving Goffman would refer to this as an act of re-framing or “keying.” You take some primary mode of interaction—unabridged happiness spilling over into a smile—draw a line around it, and then use it within some entirely foreign and more complex situation. Both parties know that this smile isn’t actually a smile, just as people having a play-fight both know that they’re not actually trying to hurt each other. It’s a mask that is used knowingly as a mask, and in case there is a risk of this being misunderstood, the eyes become almost excessively stern, just to confirm that there is no emotion at stake. If this smile needs to convey one thing above all else, it is (to paraphrase Rene Magritte) “this is not a smile.” (Note that this is not the same smile used when someone has held a door open for you. That smile, often accompanied by “thank you,” involves smiley eyes, and conveys genuine pleasure that the world contains people who hold doors open.)

Of all the human acts to re-frame and empty out, a smile! The first piece of specifically human communication between parent and child, re-framed as a tool for strangers to avoid talking to each other! It’s like buying a beautiful piece of sculpture and using it as a doorstop. There are so many other ways for strangers to acknowledge one another. So next time you try and share an alcove table in the British Library cafe, if the guy gets up without smiling and offers you a high-five, that’ll be me.

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