I’m a celebrity, get me a bowl of nutritious, tasty breakfast cereal, mmmm...

From next year, product placement will be allowed on some British TV shows. The reason this is necessary, we are informed, is that technological changes have made it easier for viewers to avoid advertising placed between programming. But I suspect it’s just as much because viewers have developed a more sophisticated understanding about how advertising works, and are thus more cynical about it. Introducing product placement to the likes of Coronation Street may work, but only on those viewers who remain a bit naïve and trusting about the essential benevolence of consumer capitalism and the way it manipulates human desires; the unaware; the incurious; the dim. And inevitably, as product placement becomes a more popular revenue model for TV companies, programming targeting the dim and incurious – indeed, actively excluding the curious – will become even more prevalent.

And we will look back on the current glut of celebreality shows as a golden age of British TV.

Don’t regret the error

I’ve always preferred the films of Terry Gilliam to those of Martin Scorsese. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the former is in some objective sense a better director than the latter; it’s just that while Scorsese’s films often deal with characters who are teetering between sanity and insanity, triumph and disaster, with Gilliam you’re aware that the whole production is doing that, with the director balanced precariously on top of the whole edifice.

So I have an instinctive sympathy towards the notion of a ‘festival of errors’, of the sort being staged in Paris this weekend. The French education system, in common with so many others around the world, has become so fixated on targets and examination results and serving the needs of business that students have become pathologically averse to making mistakes, and as such they’re unable to make intellectual discoveries of their own. The moment a teacher says “He’s a nice kid, but he asks too many questions”, you know there’s a problem, and it’s not with the kid. The only permissible query now seems to be “Will this come up in the exam?”

Paradoxically, by encouraging children to experiment with failure, we’re actually raising our expectations of what they can achieve, what they can cope with. The alternative is that they’re unable to deal with ideas that exist outside the parameters of the syllabus, the phenomenon of “we haven’t done that”. Although maybe it’s too late, when we get to the stage that books have to be written because 21st-century children can’t understand the antiquated language. Not Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton, mind you, or even Dickens or the Brontës; they need help with the Famous Five novels of Enid Blyton, the first of which was published less than 70 years ago.

What’s in the box?

About the only bit of quantum theory I can really get my head around is the idea that observation affects results; that once the box is opened, Schrödinger’s cat is no longer in its dead/undead state, it’s one or the other.

So although we may have a desire to know, sometimes we hold back from investigating in case we affect the result, and thus become the story. In the aftermath of the Raoul Moat saga, there was much harrumphing about the Facebook page set up in his honour by one Siobhan O’Dowd; did tens of thousands of people really think this pink-faced slab of self-pity was really a legend? Well, possibly not. It’s been suggested that a good number – possibly a majority – of those who nominally ‘liked’ the page actually did so to tell the Moat fans what a bunch of idiots they were. And the more people who did that, the higher the number of apparent Moat fans rose. If you just wanted to find out out the relative numbers of pro- and anti-Raoulards, you still had to press the ‘like’ button, skewing the numbers still further.


There was a similar dilemma for those who wanted to find out how well the Times website was doing since it introduced its new paywall. It wasn’t simply a matter of not wanting to drop a few quid into Murdoch’s pocket; it was the knowledge that to take a peek would skew the statistics, making the reader part of the news. Of course, it would be harder in this case to be able to put a number on the readers, or indeed to distinguish between the merely curious and those actually willing to pay because they wanted to read the words and look at the picture. But one could get an idea of how successful the enterprise was by, for example, the number of readers appending comments to the latest Jeremy Clarkson article, presumably along the lines of “ROFL Jeremy Clarkson You Legend”. Incidentally, I’ve always been impressed by Clarkson’s use of metaphors that seem to imply that a car is a beautiful woman, and at the same time his own penis; a paradox that even Schrödinger may have struggled to explain.

And on a slightly different note (but back to Facebook), the tale of the Dr Pepper campaign that referenced the notoriously scatological 2 Girls 1 Cup film clip. The story broke on the tediously ubiquitous Mumsnet (of course it did) and immediately presented professionally disgusted news outlets with a dilemma of their own; how to communicate the depravity of the film under discussion, without actually naming it, or saying why it’s so depraved? The Telegraph had a go with a reference to “a hardcore pornographic film which is notorious for the obscene practices it depicts”, although one wonders what sort of hardcore pornographic film doesn’t depict obscene practices. And of course whether unhygienic but consensual behaviour should be a matter too disgusting to be discussed by the same media outlets that had been covering in forensic detail the activities of a murderous sociopath just a few days previously.

PS: David Hepworth also reflects on whether you can talk about swearing when you’re not allowed to swear.

Getting down to business

If you’ve ever spent any time in Asia – unless you’ve spent your whole time secluded in tourist hotels – you’ll have encountered the squat toilet. Opinion is divided on the merits of the device. Some argue that it is more hygienic, in that the feet are the only part of the body to come into contact with apparatus; and also that the squatting posture is a more natural one for the elimination of food wastes. Others find it very difficult to keep their balance, resulting in all manner of mishaps. Essentially, though, it’s a question of what you’ve become used to; when Mao Zedong visited the Soviet Union, he always insisted on taking a Chinese-style loo with him, which he would have placed on top of the barbaric occidental seat.

Increasingly, at least in premises where foreigners tend to congregate, sit-down, flush toilets are becoming the norm; although it’s also fairly common to have both styles represented in the same set of stalls, which surely is the most helpful and civilised solution in a global, polycultural society.

Well, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? The management of a shopping centre in Rochdale has apparently been advised that some customers from Asian backgrounds might prefer to use squat toilets. And seeing as how they’re in the business of making money by giving the customers a wide choice of goods and services, they decided to install a few squat loos, for those who might want such a thing. You know, a bit like when you couldn’t get organic vegetables in supermarkets, and then some people said “It would be nice if we could get organic vegetables in supermarkets”, and then suddenly you could get organic vegetables in supermarkets, but you could also get non-organic vegetables as well, if you preferred.

Then the Daily Mail got hold of the story. Now, to be fair, they could have really gone to town on this one. Granted, they interview someone from the British Toilet Association, who says he thinks it’s a bad idea, but doesn’t mention that installing squat toilets is rather cheaper than the alternative, so it’s obviously bad news for his members. And they quote the response of Philip Davies, the Conservative rentaquote bell-end MP for Shipley, who, after the Pavlovian bit about political correctness, informs us that “We in Britain are rightly proud of our toilets”, which is just plain weird, and perhaps a little sad.

But it’s only when they throw it open to the readers that things get really silly:

• What happened to western civilisation! I am certainly not interested in his backward money wasting scams.
• Absolutely disgusting that these things should be used in a pubic [sic] place in Britain, may as well squat in the street, yet more of the trend to Islamify Britain.
• You must be joking!? They are welcome to do number ones and number twos here, but don't take our toilets away from us aswell as everything else!! I can't read the Daily Mail whilst squatting down.
• I see, so now we English are not even allowed to sit down on the toilet anymore in case it offends "asians".

And so on. To be fair, there’s an occasional blip of common sense, such as this remark from a reader in Shanghai:

• Great news. Don't British people expect Western toilets wherever they go in the world regardless of the culture of their hosts?

which is immediately red-arrowed into the ground. But that’s the thing about Mail readers. Wherever they go in the world, it’s not actually a foreign country or a foreign culture they’ve arrived in; it’s just a bit of Britain that hasn’t quite got the hang of proper, British civilisation yet, where, with a bit of encouragement and, if necessary, a sound thrashing or two, the natives will eventually learn to speak English, drink sherry, and defecate in a manner that is only right and proper, preferably with the assistance of the Daily Mail.

PS: Just wondering if a branch of this restaurant might appear in Rochdale. Although the seating appears to follow the Mail-approved model.

Beige is the new brown

In what has become a prof0undly tired marketing trope Kraft, purveyors of Vegemite, have launched a bizarre new variant to their ever popular brand – a cheesy blend called iSnack2.0 – and then withdrawn it in the face of ‘public hostility’. But why go to the cost and effort of staging such a lame stunt? Kraft should instead follow the example of Michael LeVell, who plays Kevin Webster in Coronation Street. He’s threatened to quit if the character doesn’t dump his girlfriend and go back to his cancer-stricken wife. No icky new product, no idiotic, early-Noughties name, no fake outrage. Instead LeVell provides the dud product (the infidelity) and the shocked reaction (threat of resignation) in the space of a few sentences. And at Christmas, Kevin goes back to Sally, and we get the chastened climbdown.

Give that man an iSnack2.0 sandwich now!

PS: Tate Modern follows suit, with the help of the Obscene Publications squad.

Punchcard blues

Modern objections to the prevalence of information technology are largely based on the allegation that omnipresent sources of knowledge – Google, BlackBerry, Wikipedia, iPhone, satnav – reduce us to a state of passive idiocy, unable to retain information without technical support. It’s something I touch on in Chapter Five of The Noughties; not that this is a new observation, of course:

Wife: Have you had a good day at the office, dear?

Husband: No, it was terrible. The computer broke and we all had to think!

(Contributed by Joanne Shakeshaft of Moston to Whizzer and Chips, 8th April, 1978, given away with today’s Guardian.)

Antonin Scalia is a monkey fighter and he can suck my lozenge

It’s not often I find myself rooting for the Murdoch empire, but when it comes to Fox TV’s challenge to the US Federal Communications Commission policy on swearing, I’m in the same corner as nasty old Rupe.

Essentially, in the wake of St Bono offering up a wee swearie at the Golden Globes in 2003, the FCC elected to operate a zero tolerance policy against bad language on network TV. This extends even to so-called “fleeting expletives”, usually unplanned, unscripted moments on live TV when an inadvertent flip or blimey slips out, the verbal equivalent of Janet Jackson’s nipple. And now the Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to uphold the Commission’s judgement.

The most vociferous of the anti-rudeness judges is the charming Antonin Scalia, who suggests that references to “sexual or excretory activities” trump any footling need to uphold the First Amendment. Now, I’ve never quite understood what’s wrong with sexual or excretory activities. I’m not sure where Justice Scalia thinks his nine children came from: maybe the stork brought them; maybe the same stork then removed all his bodily wastes when he wasn’t looking. But personally, given the choice between Scalia’s bumptious primness, and a clapped-out rock star saying “fuck”, I know which one I find obscene. The only good thing about the man is his passing resemblance to the Angelo Muscat (the butler in The Prisoner).

And without resorting to sneering generalisations, I think it’s useful to point out that on British television, this is a joke; in the States, this is reality.

Dunce in a lifetime

Two more good examples of wordsmithery (albeit neither of them a patch on Roland’s moment of dizzy brilliance from yesterday).

In the Guardian's obituary of the diplomat Nicholas Henderson, his group of schoolfriends is said to have shared “the horror of the dim”, a phrase that veers perilously close to snobbery but you do rather see where they were coming from. And for the benefit of the aforementioned dim, Rod Liddle in the Times succinctly explains why those ghastly protesters in Luton should not have been banned: “Proper western liberal democracy is about accommodating all forms of fabulous stupidity”. Nice.

And on a less exalted level, I discuss the in-concert crapness of one of my favourite bands, and encourage others to do the same, here.

PS: But far more significantly, lock up your slightly disreputable-looking boychildren, the Spinster's back!

Monkey* gone to heaven

I don’t know whether the above cartoon, published in the New York Post earlier this week to much brouhaha, was intended to be racist. As Gawker has pointed out, the artist, Sean Delonas, doesn’t appear to be a particularly sophisticated political thinker, but his peculiar obsession would seem to be homosexuality rather than race.

As with the Danish cartoons controversy (see here and here for previous rumblings), I think the aspect that everyone’s overlooked is that Delonas’s cartoon is completely crap, a far greater crime on my charge sheet than any perceived sociopolitical insensitivity.

He does, however, follow in a glorious tradition of bad, reactionary cartoonists. I have particularly fond childhood memories of leafing through my grandparents’ copies of the Daily Express and enjoying the foam-flecked daubs of the veteran Cummings. Here are a couple of his gems, that make Delonas look like a woolly liberal:





*Although, as the deliciously preposterous Al Sharpton failed to acknowledge, chimpanzees aren’t monkeys.

PS: And, if you really want to see people living up to derogatory ethnic stereotypes, here’s an Irish joke to beat them all.