Join the Jim Bliss Fifty:

It goes without saying that I’ll be avoiding the writing of Steven Wells from now on (any music writer who can write: “If a band are any good at all they’ll play their best toon first. And that toon will deliver a killer hook in the first 30 seconds…” clearly doesn’t have the faintest idea about music, no matter how many singles he reviewed for the NME). And I’m unlikely to encounter Benedict Brogan again until the next time his drivel is highlighted by a decent writer. But between them, they’ve dragged the reputation of mainstream journalism even further into the pit of filth in which it’s been wallowing. And I’ll be reading The Guardian’s Arts Section with a little more scepticism in future. Can we assume their book reviewers bothered to progress past Chapter 1? Did the film critic walk out after the first five minutes? Seems like it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Read the rest

There’s a protest on the roof of Parliament about the proposed third runway at Heathrow airport. Benedict Brogan, political editor of the Daily Mail, isn’t happy. He picked up one of the paper aeroplanes the protesters were throwing to find…

…it’s a photocopy of an email from someone at BA to a Dept of Transport official about something complicated that I can’t be bothered to read…

…thus neatly summing up the problem with most modern journalists: things are complicated and they can’t be bothered. Any government minister wanting to sneak something dodgy past the Daily Mail now knows what to do: get folding.

We know New Labour and dignity parted company some time ago, but they will insist in continuing to poo on the reputation of politics in this country. Here’s Former Home Secretary and serial resigner David Blunkett using his ’skills’ to their full potential. That is, whoring them to a fifth-rate television channel:

In what is billed by Five as a “bold social experiment”, Banged Up will see Blunkett head up the “parole board” of a “prison” that mixes reformed offenders with young people on the cusp of a life of crime.

Just what makes Five think Blunkett’s an expert on prisons is anybody’s guess. Former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham described Blunkett as ‘not fit’ to be in charge of Britain’s prisons. I wonder if Blunkett will become hysterical and order his televisual charges to be machine-gunned if they fail to do his bidding.

He talks of the programme ‘creating a grasp of reality’ which is at least in keeping with the New Labour ethos of fabricating truth. I wonder if we’ll see the true reality of British prisons: racist and Asian prisoners mixed together, two suicides a week, and 70 per cent of Blunkett’s lags being mentally ill. And for added realism, in the second series, 75 percent of the ‘young people on the cusp of a life of crime’ will be invited back.

Anyway, never mind that. How about a sequel called Knocked Up where Blunkett impregnates married socialites? The possibilities are endless. Cocked Up with Blunkett trying to apply for a job when his Criminal Record Bureau check wrongly brands him a nonce.

Made Up where Blunkett examines the Blair government’s case for war in Iraq. Blown Up where Blunkett has to help clear unexploded British cluster bomblets from an Afghan village.

How about some ideas in keeping with Blunkett’s level of dignity? Pissed Up where each week Blunkett and a celebrity see who can wee the highest up a wall. Or Zipped Up where Blunkett has to use a public urinal while wearing boxing gloves.

Then there’s Dried Up where Blunkett ponders where his credibility went. And Time’s Up where Blunkett puts us all out of his misery and retires.

(Thanks to Derrick for the link.)

Update: Then there’s Softened Up where Blunkett is kidnapped, flown to Syria and then water-boarded. And Ripped Up where he examines what ten years of New Labour has done to 800 years of civil liberties.

There’s not much to add to the story of the missing draft of the Iraqi dossier finally being released. The New Statesman, who have been following the story all along have some good coverage.

The general lack of media coverage and analysis across the board was a little surprising considering some of the more high profile casualties were newspaper editors and BBC director generals. But then I suppose ‘Compliant media treated like dickheads and used as propagandists by still-at-large war criminals‘ is a story most editors would balk at.

I doubt many of them wanted to be reminded - and to remind their readers - of their complicity. Journalists, eh? What was it Humbert Wolfe said?

So, 99 per cent of the respondents to The Sun’s survey on capital punishment are calling for its return. That’s ‘nearly’ 100,000 people.

The Sun’s been struggling with its circulation of late but let’s be generous and say it sells ‘nearly’ three million copies a day. That being the case, The Sun’s survey reveals that just 3.3% of its readership supports the return of capital punishment.

Or 0.16 per cent of the entire population.

It’s a trick they’ve used before, of course. And you can’t really blame them, this being a better* headline…

…than this…

* ‘Better’ in this case meaning its ability to shift more copies, and nothing to do with its accuracy or quality.

Update: Tim does a better analysis.

Jane Garvey, the new presenter of Women’s Hour says Radio 4 has ‘a massively middle class bent‘. Now, Garvey came to her new job from Five Live’s Drive, an execrable programme where she exchanged inanities with the woeful Peter Allen over a platudinous presentation of the day’s events*. On that form, I’m left thinking that Garvey’s definition of middle class starts with people who get out of the bath to go to the toilet.

You know, I’m not a particularly well-educated or well-read person. I’m not what you’d describe as an intellectual. But one thing I am, in my own way, is a self-improver, an auto-didact. The government wants us to be drones, repeating our allotted task in order to service the economy until we die. You want to smell the roses? You’re going to have to grow them yourself.

I listen to Radio 4 not because I’m middle class - I’ll kill any man who describes me as such - but because it’s didactic. And massively entertaining. Five Live is rotting my mind. Five of the sweetest words in the English language are ‘Victoria Derbyshire is on holiday’. Garvey’s suggestion seems to be that instead of elevating the lower classes, Radio 4 should sink to their level. She can fuck right off, frankly. And the mouth-breathers she rode in on.

Jesus, even an ill-educated prole like me can see the cultural desertification that’s creeping up on us. As Jim Bliss said about the reaction to Rowan William’s speech - it’s anti-intellectualism. And the frustrating thing is, it wouldn’t take much to reverse it. My life was improved forever when, as a student in Huddersfield, I found the second-hand bookshop in the town centre. The prices were cheap enough for speculative purchases and very soon I’d put down the James Herberts and the Frederick Forsyths and was reading Thomas Hardy, Joseph Heller, Umberto Eco, Graham Greene. The world suddenly seemed massive and inspirational.

I know life’s hard and day are long and people are knackered but just once I wish someone would put down that novel about the SAS and pick up Catch-22 (it’s about war ‘n’ shit). Or drop The Da Vinci Code and pick up Foucault’s Pendulum (it’s about conspiracies ‘n’ shit). Or Our Man in Havana (it’s a comedy spy thriller ‘n’ shit). They’re more of a challenge to read, granted, but then they don’t talk to you the way Five Live talks to you either.

Try an Elmore Leonard - they’re like crack. When I discovered his books I read a dozen on the trot. His plots, characters and writing are like nothing else. And he doesn’t sound like Patricia Hewitt sending you to bed without any supper.

If Robert Sharp’s right and we only get time to digest 624 books before we die, why not try a little chateaubriand between the burgers? Try Radio 4 between 6.30 and 7 pm on a weekday or on a Saturday morning (skip Fi Glover though, she’s from Five Live and shit as well). Turn off Victoria Derbyshire’s daily racist and yahoo magnet and go and smear yourself with your own faeces instead. Trust me, you’ll feel like an intellectual titan.

* In the run up to the Iraq war, I remember one day them going on and on about a dead badger than had been painted over by someone painting double yellow lines on a road. On and on and on and on and on and on they went about this sodding badger. I emailed in and said: ‘We might be at war soon and you keep going on about a badger? You’re at the cutting edge of the news agenda.’ And they read it out!

One of the bigger questions for me about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech about Sharia law is: do I really care?

As a bitter ex-Catholic and concrete-certain athiest, at my harshest I regard all this little more than the captain of one set counter-Enlightenment values speaking out on another set of counter-Enlightenment values. Let them get on with it, people in Britain are caring less and less about religion, and we’ll all be foaming at the mouth over something else this time next week.

But then you see the array of forces ranged against the Archbishop and it’s difficult indeed not to immediately and automatically jump to his defence out of an obligation of pure opposition. It’s a knee-jerk reaction of its own. Indeed, knees have been thrashing so furiously over the last few days, it makes you sorry they weren’t all wired up to a fancy new knee dynamo. You could have lit Birmingham for a week. If we could have harnessed the pig-ignorant self-righteousness as well, we could have powered Scotland as a bonus.

Just look at them though, queuing up to have a pop at Rowan Williams. The ‘I’m not racist but’-ers and the ‘I am racist, and’-ers, the bandwagon jumpers and the vested-interests, the wilfully ignorant and the woefully ignorant, newspapers with no more care than tomorrow’s circulation, minority audience 24 hour news channels trying to outdo each other, radio phone-in shows and speak-your-brains comment boards entertaining the barely articulate and the barely literate, those who use political correctness as a stick to beat rather than words to sooth.

Then there’s the fools, tools and mules, bloggers, muggers and self-tuggers, demagogues, demi-demagogues and attack dogs, the has-beens, never-beens and wannabes, the purblind, unsound of mind and the axe to grind. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. How many, you have to wonder, have read the speech or heard the interview? Or have a view of Sharia law beyond some vague imagining of hand-chopping and women-stoning?

The thing is, the beauty of all this is that the people trying to knock the Archbishop’s hat off don’t have to have heard or read Rowan Williams’ views. They’re all confident in their safety in numbers. They can think to themselves, ‘well, someone here must have heard him and read him, so I don’t have to’, ignoring the motives of a lot of the people at the head of the throng. The wisdom of crowds, my arse. It’s a mob, pure and simple: most of them are simple and very few are pure. Hmmm, it turns out the Archbishop is a weapon with a multitude of uses - you can use him as a stick to beat anyone you like.

And now ‘they’ are talking of getting rid of Williams. Be careful what you wish for. Always keep an eye on the guy second in line. Do you want to ditch Gordon Brown only to get Jack Straw, an altogether more terrifying prospect? Ditch Cameron and risk a Gove or similar? Ditch Williams and get a Nazir-Ali? That said, those alternatives would be a boon to the legion of Islam-baiters who turned up this week. Straw with his fear of the veil, Gove with his Celcius 7/7, and Nazir-Ali with his ‘no-go areas‘.

And in the middle are Britain’s Muslims, the vast majority you never hear from, never see, and who - one would swear - just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. I wonder how many are feeling just that little bit less welcome and just that little bit more wary right now. Someone should tell them that as long a they continue to serve us our curries and keep their convenience stores open all hours (and whatever else it is popular imagination permits them to do) and seek no influence on ‘British’ ‘values’ - the glory of which we’ve seen on full display in the last week - they’ll be safe enough.

Update: Daniel Davies, as ever, rocks.

Update updated: Blimey! (via PDF.)

Me and the Mrs are off to London for the day and while I’m there I’ve set myself a little project.

Tom at Blairwatch has a string of headlines about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s unfortunate statements of yesterday (I say unfortunate not because I necessarily disagree with him but because he seems to have massively underestimated the response he was going to get from lazy journalists, political vested interests and wannabe demagogues).

The headlines, according to Tom, are majorly wide of the mark. I’m not going to comment further until I’ve allowed myself the luxury of listening to the Archbishop’s interview on the radio and read his speech. It’s an odd notion, admittedly, but I’m going to see if it works.

In the mean time, my project is to spend the day informing myself via nothing else than news bulletin and newspaper headlines to see how utterly ill-informed and mentally unbalanced I am by the end of the play. It’s dangerous, I know, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take to in order to get a feel for how media commentators and politicians operate and make their money.

I’ll attempt to document the journey with photos and notes. Wish me luck.

Remember Anna Mikhailova? She was the student journalist who, while on work experience, outed the Girl With A One-Track Mind.

Such resourcefulness has stood the cub reporter in good stead.

The Collings and Herrin podcast is ace.

I’ve owned this book for years…

…but looking at it this morning, I’ve only now realised how Dredd found the courage to defeat the invading army of Sovs.

He was pissed.

This guy is almost entirely right in what he’s saying. It’s just that he’s got absolutely no right whatsoever to be saying it,

I can’t shift this new tune by Nick Cave:

Cave lives in Brighton. I can help thinking that he’s seen me out and about because he’s definitely stolen my moves for this video.

(Via Warren Ellis)

The Independent’s website has had a makeover. It’s all right, nowt flash, and certainly better than the previous monstrosity. And let’s hope it’s a bit more robust than the last one which was up and down like a bride’s nightie. (Yes, I know I’m one to talk but then I’m not a multi-million pound media outfit).

There’s just one thing. The Indy’s web designers, in their wisdom, have changed the structure of the site’s permalinks again (they did the same with the last revamp as well). This means that any previous deep-linking from blogs or other sites to articles on the Independent’s website no longer work. Idiots.

Oh, boo hoo…

The government has abandoned plans to impose a pre-9pm ban on junk food TV advertising when it unveils its new anti-obesity strategy tomorrow, safeguarding more than £200m a year in TV advertising revenue.

No doubt there will be those who are upset, though I’m not sure why. Anyone who thinks they can appeal to an advertising executive’s sense of morality clearly needs to see a doctor.

You’d have more joy asking it to levitate above Birmingham than expecting the advertising industry to set aside the entrenched hatred of humanity that allows it to be so successful. And as for expecting this government to raise our kids, well, it’s doing such a good job with everything else, isn’t it?

So, what’s the solution? I’m afraid most people aren’t going to like it. Don’t want your children watching adverts trying to sell them an early death? Then don’t let them watch the channels showing those ads.

This might come as a surprise to some but there are television channels out there that don’t show adverts. Apart from that one that shows the Fantastic Four cartoon and Captain Scarlet, the commercial channels aren’t really worth watching anyway, are they?

Take some personal responsibility (remember that?). The kids nagging for a mechanically recovered burger or a bucket of antibiotic-and-abscess chicken? Say no. Go on, try it. Advertising execs aren’t forcing you to watch the adverts or buy the slop. They’re just laughing themselves sick in swanky bars while you and your porcine brood are blaming everybody but yourselves.

‘Michael Barrymore is to return to the limelight playing Spike Milligan in a stage drama about the comedian’s life,’ according to the BBC.

What next? OJ Simpson as Nelson Mandela?

There’s no denying that the Beijing National Stadium is an impressive building. Gordon Brown certainly seemed to enjoy his press conference there over the weekend.

The thing is, I can’t say I’m taken with the colour of the stadium as it is. It’s a sort of dirty grey. How did they get it like that? Was it Beijing’s smog (that Gordon mentioned it in passing during his photo opportunity)? Maybe the builders mixed into the concrete the ashes of their colleagues who’ve been killed (that Gordon didn’t mention in passing during his photo opportunity) during construction?

I don’t know about you, but dead builders seem quite a high price to pay for a bit of running and jumping about. The Chinese regime obviously think it’s a price worth paying to help rehabilitate its international reputation.

I suppose Peter Hain is too old to start digging up sports pitches again?

I see Guido is using once again more tittle tattle of a sexual nature as a battering ram against the gates of the ‘mainstream media elite’.

All fair enough, I suppose, if you get a rise out of that kind of thing. You know, dragging a kid into your self-promotion.

Except. There are gatekeepers of the new media elite who are also reluctant to open up. People with long memories will remember, a while back, a group of bloggers attempting to ‘dish the dirt on their own’ thinking ‘it would be of huge interest to the public’.

Across blogs, in London and Brighton pubs, it has been common knowledge for years. This blogger is at the heart of the politico-media nexus that constitutes the new disintermediated class.

The blogger who’s skeleton from his past the group attempted to ventilate ran for his lawyer and threatened them with legal action. When attending an interview to talk about the matter, the blogger took along his daddy[1] for moral support (the blogger is 40).

Can anyone remember that blogger’s name?

[1] Update: Or was it granddaddy?. Maybe Guido could clarify for us.

Also, this is from Guido’s ‘about me‘ blurb:

Any kind of reference to Guido’s family [...] is deleted without hesitation.

Couldn’t you just slap him?

Today marks the tenth anniversary of American blogger Matt Drudge breaking the story of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Things were never the same again. The world was rocked to its foundations by the astounding news that older men like getting their knobs sucked by younger women.

There were many crimes committed by the Clinton Whitehouse. However, I don’t think there are many sane people in the world who think Bill getting a nosh from an intern was one of them. Or at least one of the major ones. How the odd happy finish from Monica impeded the Clinton presidency before right-wing prurience attempted to derail it has never been adequately explained to me.

Still, we are where we are. In his paean to Drudge, Guido Fawkes somewhat prematurely hails his hero’s coup as the end ‘once and for all [of] the gate-keeper ability, if not the mentality, of the mainstream media elite’.

Guido’s love letter to his mentor is interesting in that it fails to offer a qualitative judgement of how things have changed. How much Drudge earns and where that income allows him to live seem to be the essential yardsticks rather than any explicit estimate of whether what he produces is any good. That people in large numbers are prepared to consume a product is not always the most reliable gauge of quality. It’s a thought that’s kept the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Bernard Matthews and Noel Edmonds warm for many a year.

It’s also interesting how little change has actually been brought about despite the breathless talk of a paradigm shift. Guido talks of an ‘mainstream media elite’ without seemingly being overtly aware that he and his role model have had to largely appropriate that elite’s methods to gain what they judge and measure as success. Is there any true innovation going on?

Guido exhorts would-be one-man newsmakers to ‘go get the story’ but beyond the phone calls he makes which (unwittingly or not) come across as the transcripts of a radio show prankster, it’s difficult to see what ‘getting’ of stories he actually does. Drudge’s big moment, let us not forget, was publishing a story that a mainstream magazine had baulked at. Guido, between rare forays into editorial, presents a diet largely consisting of mainstream scraps and off-cuts. Happy (for Guido) coincidence dictated that he also made his name by publishing a story of where another prominent politician (in this case John Prescott) was putting his penis. A story, like Drudge’s breakthrough, that the mainstream media elites had deemed unpublishable.

As such, you’d be forgiven for regarding both Guido and Drudge as mere conduits; alternative venues for other people’s legwork. There’s very little ‘making’ beyond the ability to string a sentence together. It’s repetition and reaction. It’s blogging.

Guido talks of his contact with and reliance on mainstream journalists but it seems to me more of a parasitic relationship rather than a symbiotic one. Like the unfortunate Monica, it sounds like he’s had to suck a lot of cock to gain his notoriety. The loyalty of the press can be rented but not bought. And like an exploited woman who talks of empowerment when really she’s just being used, I wonder if Guido is fooling anyone else but himself. Guido’s medium is the message - journalists are happy to report on his antics and caperings rather than highlight what he’s saying. You can see why the likes of the Guardian’s Michael White might snigger at him - the lone wannabe walking the high wire without a safety net.

I’d argue that all we’re seeing is the emergence of another albeit smaller elite - not the tearing down of some great edifice. Guido is nothing if not just another monied Westminster villager only with a maverick spin. He gives off the same air of the privileged insider privy to access and esoteric knowledge forbidden to the rest of us. But this new elite lacks the inherent quality control (sub-editing for instance) that make the ‘mainstream media elite’ even vaguely tolerable. It’s just as well that Guido gives his stuff away for free because you wonder how loyal his readership would be if he was charging for it.

Of course, Guido earns his money indirectly via advertising on his blog. He doesn’t or daren’t put a price or a value (financial or qualitative) on his product. It’s a new model, if only a cheap knock-off of the old model, down-sized and the corners cut. Despite copious evidence to the contrary, I sincerely wonder if Guido is truly happy about that. Like a self-taught painter trying to copy an old master, surely it’s a melancholy matter of pale imitation and disappointment.

(Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy.)

Is anyone else finding it almost impossible to drag themselves away from those videos of Tom Cruise?

I only turned away when a thought struck me: maybe this is The Cruiser’s plan. While the rest of us are all staring wide-eyed at his pronouncements and chewing our knuckles, Scientology is on the march.

Oh, and get well soon to Larry. Hopefully real help will be along soon.

Torchwood, fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, won’t get fooled again.

If you want a perfect example of the triumph of the (lack of) spirit at the heart of British politics, look no further than John Harris’ interview with culture secretary James Purnell in today’s Guardian.

When he talks, the requisite New Labour tics are present and correct - a fondness for such wonkish adjectives as “strategic” and “systematic”, and a habit of responding to difficult enquiries by making up his own rather banal questions and briefly interviewing himself (eg, “Is it better? Yes. Is it perfect? No.”)

…

Purnell won’t be drawn on specific examples

…

He talks about “engagement with communities”

That Harris is a Labour Party supporter makes the interview all the more unsettling. Purnell is another one of those smooth, featureless New Labour drones, like the Miliband brothers, Andy Burnham and Jim Murphy, who, terrifyingly, are hailed as the future of politics in this country. As the New Statesman’s Martin Bright put it with, for some unfathomable reason, complete calm: ‘One way or another we will have Adrian Mole as Prime Minister’.

Painfully on message, chary of the tough question, indoctrinated with that lifeless, soulless use of language devoid of passion, personality or the power into inspire, I’m yet to be convinced that these people aren’t being grown in vats somewhere. Which culture was the culture secretary grown from?

Purnell’s pre-Parliament bio is the all too predictable boilerplate we’ve come to expect of these up and coming young spud guns:

While still a student he worked in the summer holidays as a researcher to Tony Blair from 1989 to 1992. After graduating he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research before moving to the BBC to become Head of Corporate Planning. In 1997 Purnell returned to work as a special advisor for the now Prime Minister Tony Blair until 2001. He also served as a board member of the Young Vic theatre.

Purnell was selected for the seat of Stalybridge and Hyde in 2001.

To wit: well connected, special adviser, parachuted into a safe seat, ya-da, ya-da, ya-da.

His master plan for the arts in Britain is…

…to usher in a new era in which the logic underlying public subsidy moves from “measurement to judgment”, and the pursuit of targets (as seen in a long-standing focus on the arts appealing to certain social categories) is superseded by a new emphasis on “excellence”

Which is all very well, in theory, but you have to ask, as you do with all these New Labour initiatives that promise tomorrow’s boysenberry conserve (nothing so common as mere jam for the new Jerusalem): what constitutes ‘excellence’ and who gets to decide?

We are besieged, and have been these long years, by the mediocrity of thought, poverty of ambition and dunderheadedness of deed of this government. Along with decisions and recommendations being made by committees of placemen and the top-down legislation being passed by rubber stamp, the precedents for a new golden age aren’t good. To say the least.

Purnell is looking forward to a ‘new renaissance’ which is extremely worrying when you consider that most of what passes for art in this country right now is almost entirely untouched by any renaissance values whatsoever. New Labour once charged itself with assembling the acme of British culture and look what we ended up with. Toiling under this regime, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would be starving artists working in call centres to scrape by.

(See also Jamie and Philip.)

I Am Legend: Take spare pants.

…to bad rubbish Ike Turner. Boo hoo, rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. Boo hoo, Rocket 88.

You know what? To borrow from Jamie Kenny, writing about another wife-beating arsehole, it meant nothing from the moment Ike first raised his hand to his wife.

Why do famous wife-beaters always get a ‘but’? Sure he hit his missus but did you see him play guitar? Sure he hit his missus but did you see him kick a ball? Sure he hit his missus but…

Tell you what, try this: spend ten minutes talking to someone who’s worked in a women’s refuge and see if these arseholes are still your heroes afterwards.

Fuck the lot of them.