Monday Moan 72

WE DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK

The press keep on telling us that they are the defenders of freedom in this country and, therefore, that there should be no shackles placed on them. They appear completely unmoved by Leveson, phone hacking, High Court trials, public disgust or anything else that suggests they should mend their ways.  They tell us they have changed, they have learned lessons from the past, they will be squeaky clean in the future and we should just trust them to do the right thing. 

Thus we have their furious reaction to Parliament’s endorsement of the Government’s new Royal Charter on Press Regulation and their determination to press ahead with their own, clearly more press-friendly, version. 

And thus we have the  The Spectator magazine joining with other press organisations to say they won’t take any notice of the Royal Charter,  with their Parliamentarian of the Year award, usually (as you’d imagine from the title) given to an individual single MP, being awarded this year to the 15 MPs who voted against Government plans.  And to top it all we have Bore-us Johnson, comical Mayor of London, urging all editors to follow the example of The Spectator and refuse to abide by the Government’s plans.   

Bare-faced, brazen disregard for anything other than their own views and self-interest.

 TALKING OF BARE-FACED AND BRAZEN ... 

Who should pop up on my screen on last week’s Question Time than Vicky Pryce, recently detained at HM’s pleasure in one of our most congenial of prisons.  Not content with trying to milk her illegal activity for all it’s worth through the publication of a book about her thoughts on prison, she sat and smirked her way through the TV programme in a bare-faced, brazen disregard for all that she had done, in a way that any editor of a UK newspaper would have been proud. 

Apparently there is absolutely no truth to the rumour that Chris Huhne was originally booked for this episode, but that Ms Pryce agreed to his request to do his time for him.

MOZART KNEW BEST

Music is one of the great joys of life to vast numbers of people.  It doesn’t matter what kind of music you like – there are so many to choose from and it is a dangerous path to tread to suggest that one form or style of music is better than another, no matter how firmly you may believe this to be the case.  That one form may be more complex, more difficult to play or sing, more varied in its dynamic range, etc. than another is unarguable – but whether it is “better” depends on too many things to make it worth arguing about. 

Having said that, we are all free to say what we like best and to choose not to listen to things we don’t like.  And we can all have an opinion on what works and what doesn’t, on  whether we think one version of a piece of music is better than another. Knowing a piece is a double-edged sword, because if the rendition you hear does not fit with your own view of how it should be performed, there is a danger you will be disappointed.   Of course, you can still enjoy it even if it isn't performed in exactly the way you hear it in your own mind, but if it strays too far either from what you like, or from what you consider to be a reasonable interpretation, then you will be disappointed.  You may even start to rant at the radio. 

So here goes.  I was listening to the radio the other day and smiled when the announcer said that the next piece would be the second movement of Mozart’s clarinet concerto.  One of the most well-known pieces of classical music, it is a favourite of mine for a whole host of reasons.  Unfortunately, the recording that then came over the airwaves just didn’t do it for me.  Far too fast and with so much embellishment,  improvisation or, as I see it, unnecessary extra notes, that the melody was sometimes almost indiscernible.  A bit like a Mariah Carey version of almost any song – you know the tune is in there somewhere, but it’s pretty difficult to work out where. 

Mozart is generally reckoned to be one of the greatest composers who ever lived.  I like to think he knew what he was doing when he wrote his music.  I’m OK with people interpreting in the sense of speed, volume, emphasis, emotion, etc. But unless he specifically invited people to improvise a section, I’d rather just hear the notes he wrote rather than those someone else has added because they think they know better than Mozart.  They don’t. 

OH JOY, IT’S CHRISTMAS ALREADY

The Christmas season has now started.  How do we know this?  Because it’s now impossible to watch the television (apart from on the advert-free BBC, free of adverts that is for anything other than its own programmes) without being bombarded with this year’s crop of cringeworthy Christmas adverts for the major retail stores. 

I blame John Lewis.  A few years ago they ran some ads that were actually quite entertaining and, possibly, quite successful in enticing people to think nice things about the store and maybe even spend more money there rather than elsewhere.  Unfortunately, every retailer now feels obliged to produce its own seasonal advertisement, which usually involves the viewer having to sit through some uninspiring footage of Christmas scenes and a few gifts, to the background of some seasonal music, with the only saving grace being the guessing game as to which store's name will come up at the end – “oh, that’s an ad for XXXX is it?”  

Apparently, some people have been heard to say that this year’s John Lewis ad has made them cry.  Really?  I can’t see why, unless it’s because of the realisation that you’ll never get that two minutes of your life back, having listened to Lily Allen try to ruin a perfectly good Keane song. 

Still, at least they haven’t made the same mistake as Tesco, and used a Rod Stewart track.  I wonder how many people will decide not to patronise Tesco this Christmas as a result? 

P.S.  A SUGGESTION POST-RUSSELL BRAND .....

A friend of mine was moved to comment on the Russell Brand article from last week  with the suggestion that “perhaps British Constitution could be introduced as a compulsory topic in our schools, not as an optional exam subject but just as an informative introduction to how the huddled masses have fought and won the right to help shape the way the country is run and why they can at least make a choice in who runs the country. It would, of course, have to be pointed out to them that the ballot paper does not carry a "Whatever" option. Yet.” 

Well said Sir!  Couldn’t agree more.  Perhaps my own interest in current affairs and in matters political and historical was developed during the time I spent mustering a low-grade A-level pass in British Constitution all those years ago.  At the risk of sounding like that old bloke who used to sit in the corner of the pub every night, it didn’t do me any harm.

Monday Moan 71

 

RUSSELL BRAND – WHY?

One of the great questions of our time is how on earth Boris Johnson ever got to be taken seriously as, well, anything.  Now we can ask the same question about Russell Brand.  

 

Brand’s recent appearance being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight has done nothing to diminish the feeling that we are being asked to take seriously someone whose antics, posturing, behaviour and general Dave Spart-like spoutings might have been mildly interesting or even amusing in the 6^th form, but who shouldn’t be allowed to sit with the adults unless he promises to act his age. 

 

Someone thought it would be a good idea to let Brandspart edit the New Statesman this month, which led to the Paxman interview on Newsnight:- 

 

RB  “It’s not that I’m not voting out of apathy, I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery and deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now and which has now reached fever pitch where you have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system so voting for it is tacit complicité (?) with that system and that’s not something I’m offering up.”

JP “Why don’t you change it then?”

RB “I’m trying to”

JP “Well why don’t you start by voting?”

RB “I don’t think it works, people have voted already and that’s what’s created the current paradigm”

JP “When did you last vote?”

RB “Never”

JP “You never, ever voted?”

RB “No. Do you think that’s really bad?”

 

According to Jane Garvey, presenter of Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme yesterday, the Newsnight interview was “one of those great media moments”.  Skating over the nonsense of that statement, she also told us that how we view Brand’s comments may depend on our age. As sweeping generalisations go, that’s up there with the best.  According to her, to many people in their 20s Brand is an inspiration. To those older than this he’s just talking “tosh”.  

 

It’s not only Brand, of course.  One James Ovenden (aged 25, writes for the Planet Ivy website, which is for and written by those aged 18-25 – so presumably he’ll be looking for a new position shortly) was interviewed by Garvey and said “I don’t vote because I don’t think the current system can do anything to address the issues like inequality, kind of house prices, the general hopelessness that young people are feeling at the moment. They won’t be able to own their own property, I think it’s something like one in five will likely own their own property and I don’t see that current system you know addressing this and I feel I’m forced to vote to keep somebody out as opposed to vote for somebody to remain in and I feel that’s negative.”

 

Faced with such an articulate and persuasive argument, Gavery asked her other interviewee “Doesn’t he have a point? Don’t you sometimes feel that the world is run by faceless multinational, international conglomerates and we are just tiny little bits of flotsam who amount to nothing?”

 

Feeling depressed at this summary of the world as it is, I was given fresh hope by Garvey when she turned back to Ovenden (aged 25) to say “don’t you think they [our current leaders] are just overwhelmed by the scale of the problem?”, to which Ovenden replied “not really, well possibly it might be that, but that’s all just semantics really”.

 

Vote for Brand and Ovenden – they’ll get us out of this mess.

 

 

ON THE OTHER HAND …..

Superficial and irritating though Blandspart may be, the ‘grown-ups’ in Parliamentland show no sign of maturing and taking their responsibilities seriously.

 

This week’s Prime Minister’s Questions was up (down) to its usual standard. 

 

How on earth are we to take any of this seriously if these people can’t have a proper debate where (a) the main participants do more than engage in knockabout playground insults, and (b) the audience listens instead of thinking their role is to pretend they are at a Christmas pantomime?

 

 

 

THE PRESS DOESN’T NEED ANY HELP – OH REALLY?

Harriet Sergeant, journalist, author and Research Fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies, appeared on BBC’s Question Time last week. Initially, I assumed that Caroline Aherne has simply come up with a new name for her ‘Mrs Merton’ character, but it turns out that Harriet is a real person after all.  She writes for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times.  

 

Answering a question from the audience about the new Royal Charter on Self Regulation of the press, Ms Sergeant distanced herself from the rest of the panel who thought it right that the press should not be the sole judges of whether they were behaving appropriately, by suggesting that “we should judge institutions by how they deal with their scandals.  We have had scandals in the press and what do we have this week?  We have two editors on trial, we have eight journalists on trial in the courts ….” 

 

Oh dear.  If she thinks this demonstrates that the press is perfectly capable of regulating itself then she needs to do some of her famed 10 months of research before she feels capable of dealing with a topic, during which she might ponder on whether those journalists referred themselves for prosecution or whether it was, in fact, the legal processes that took them there. 

 

To save her a lot of time and effort, I am willing to let her know that those journalists were using their freedoms and privileges to ignore appropriate behaviour and it was the intervention of others and the application of the law that saw them in court.  As a demonstration of the strength of self-regulation this left rather a lot to be desired.

 

 

TESCO – STILL FAILING TO GET IT TOGETHER

Have you tried to cash-in your Tesco vouchers recently?  Maybe it’s just my incompetence, but it took me ages to order some things online using my Tesco vouchers – including having to register separately for the Clubcard, Tesco Direct and F&F clothing parts of the site.

 

Having spent far more time on all this than was appropriate I then turned up to collect the goods ordered.  Nobody on the ‘Click & Collect’ desk – there were two people looking after this, the electrical, the mobile and the phone desks, and both were serving the same customer.  

 

The goods were, eventually collected.  Unfortunately, on getting home and trying the clothes on, they did not fit properly and a bigger size was needed.  Not to worry, the helpful person on customer service helpline said to fill in the returns form and return it and the goods to any store and they’d send them back.

 

Not quite as simple as it sounds. Again, it took ages for one of the employees to finish dealing with another customer at one of the four desks he was covering.  Then neither he, nor a colleague who he summoned knew anything about this process and tried instead to offer a refund.  I didn’t want that, and the refund complications arising from having part paid for them with vouchers threatened to cause all sorts of system overloads for a while.  Eventually the boss was raised on the phone and he said that the process was to call the customer service helpline for advice.

 

Maybe it was just luck, or maybe there is only one person on the helpline, but it was the same person I had spoken to earlier. The shop employee passed the phone to me – the voice at the other end said that maybe he hadn’t explained things clearly enough to me, but all I needed to do was hand it over to the store staff and they’d send it back to the depot for action.  “Exactly as I had told them”, I said, and handed the phone back.

 

All I expected was to appear at the store, someone to be there to deal with my issue, take the parcel and say “thanks, we’ll take it from here”.  Is that too much to expect?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Moan 53



 

Playground spat ……

Ever watched children arguing in the playground by calling each other silly names designed to be insulting and to make their watching friends giggle?  If you want to return to your younger days and experience this kind of thing again then the best way to do it is to watch the UK House of Commons in action.

 

Last week we had the weekly slanging match that is Prime Minister’s Questions, during which the leader of this nation decided against taking the moral high ground by venturing down the road of insults, likening his opponent to Bert, a character from The Muppets.

 

It was pathetic, but it left me with an uneasy feeling that Ed Balls, that most unimpressive and unlovable of politicians, would be unable to resist lowering the tone still further. Sure enough, hectoring Ed decided that the mature way to put over his argument was to compare the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to Bungle and Zippy – apparently characters from the children’s tv series Rainbow.

 

I’d like to think that the nation felt insulted by this childish behaviour, but I’m afraid that the number who felt like that was probably matched by those who thought this was the height of great political debate – and an even greater number were simply unaware or didn’t care.

 

 

Got a question?  Want to hear a debate?  Don’t bother watching this then

Having fallen asleep during the BBC News last Thursday, I woke to find that Question Time was on my screen again.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!

 

Here we had the combined intellectual forces of David Willetts, University and Science Minister, Liz Kendall, Shadow Health Secretary, Simon Highes, Deputy Leader of the Lib Dems, Jill Kirby, ex-leader of the Centre for Policy Studies, and Mark Steel, comedian.

 

Unfortunately, the assembled panellists decided to adopt the same approach as just about every other set of panellists I have seen in recent years – no listening to what others had to say, no debate, just regurgitation of entrenched views, talking (often shouting) over the other panellists, and all delivered in a self-righteous way.  The ‘comedian’ (or equivalent) is often the worst, particularly if they bring with them (as in this case) very obvious political views. 

 

And then we have the audience.  Now, we all know that the audience comprises people with political allegiances – that’s how the tickets are distributed, and the BBC says it aims to get an audience representing all political views. Unfortunately, the result if often that the members of the audience who are called upon to speak do so with even more venom and bile than those on the panel.

 

Unedifying and dispiriting.  Wish I’d stayed asleep.

 

 

Revenge is sweet ……………

So, Kevin Rudd, ex-Australian Prime Minister, elbowed aside by Julia Gillard in 2010, got his revenge last week and was re-elected as leader of the Labour Party and, therefore, became Prime Minister again.  Julia Gillard said she would quit politics.

 

Australian men have a reputation for sporting prowess and a generally macho approach to life.

 

And then there is Kevin. 

 

 

 

Glastonbury – kick off the slippers

OK, I’m getting on and I have to accept that I no longer recognise most of the names of the acts who appeared at this year’s Glastonbury Festival.  That’s just the way life goes, and I feel no shame in it at all.

 

But I am confused.  Sir Bruce Forsyth at Glastonbury?  Made the Rolling Stones seem like young kids – joking, of course.  Average age of 69, apparently.  Best act ever at Glastonbury, apparently.  That must make all the headliners from the previous festivals feel great.

 

Best of all was the brief piece on the BBC News interviewing people who had queued the longest to see the Rolling Stones and were happily waiting at the front for most of the day.  They ranged from youngsters whose grandparents probably remember buying Rolling Stones records in the 1960s, to the grandparents themselves – as shown in the picture. 

 

Couldn’t help wondering how they were going to cope with having to stay in their front row position for all of those hours though.  It’s a long way to the toilets, for example.

Monday Moan 51

Bring me sunshine

This week sees the long-awaited visit of the Ecuadorean Minister to the UK in order to ‘discuss’ with the British Government what to do with the alleged whistle-blower and sexual offender Julian Assange (See Moan 49).
 

 

Apparently, the Ecuadorean Minister will be asking the British Government to allow Assange to sunbathe and enjoy the warm weather and sunshine because apparently, he hasn't been able to do so for a year.

 

Now I don’t know if this story is true, but I hope it is.  The absurdity of the whole affair would be summarised by a Government Minister travelling 17,000 km to make a serious claim like this.  My mind is now picturing the androgynous and albino-like figure of Assange being given an armed escort to lie on the grass in Green Park in order to get a bit of a tan.

 

But quite why this self-confessed law-breaker should be allowed to see the sun when most of us in the UK are still searching for it ourselves in this most miserable of summers  is beyond me. He and his Ecuadorean minders will have to be quick to spot the day when there is enough sunshine to warrant getting out the sun lotion.

 

 

Scandal in every action

The British press wants to be taken seriously. It wants us all to believe that it is engaged in investigations into matters of real importance – that it is the defender of our freedoms and interests.

 

Really?  Then it will have to do better than its renewed obsession with ‘scandal’ in every action of our politicians. 

 

Following the ‘revelations’ about the House of Commons Energy Committee’s Chairman Tim Yeo, which forced him to step-aside whilst his actions were investigated (see Moan 50), his deputy Sir Robert Smith stepped into the spotlight.  Bad luck for him.

 

In a piece designed to make something out of nothing, he found himself the subject of a typical Daily Mail piece which ‘revealed’ that he held some shares in Shell and had received some hospitality from BP.

 

Throwing into the report words and phrases such as ‘scandal-hit committee’, ‘potential conflicts of interest’ and that staple of nonsense reporting – ‘sleaze’, you might have imagined that this was a damaging revelation of secret information that had been withheld from the public until the Daily Mail stepped in to save us all.

 

But no, the article then acknowledged that all this activity had been fully declared in the register of interests, as required by Parliamentary rules, and that “there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing”. Which begs the question – why write this article in the first place?

 

Get a sense of proportion, please.

 

 

 

Questioning time

I usually avoid watching Question Time these days because it so often simply allows politicians to parade their well-rehearsed views, with no pretence of being open to consider alternative viewpoints or engaging in serious debate.  However, for some reason I failed to move quickly enough to switch channels this week and so caught an extract of the programme from Edinburgh.

 

What a scary programme it was.  The audience contained only 16 and 17-year olds, looking for all the world like a crack team of Sandmen from the film Logan’sRun .  It must be that I am getting old, but they seemed remarkably self-assured, articulate and passionate in whatever they said – unlike many a Question Time audience I have seen in the past.

 

And then we had Angus Robertson, SNP leader in the House of Commons.  I didn’t see the whole programme, so I don’t know if he was carrying the full Scottish chip on his shoulder or just a portion of it, but he was gratifyingly surly and full of the anger and resentment of the caricature downtrodden-Scot in the small section I saw. 

 

 

If the SNP really want independence then they have missed a trick by not campaigning for the whole of the UK to be given a vote on the subject. A few weeks of Angus and those like him would have the rest of the UK voting almost unanimously to cut the tie-line and wave goodbye.

 

 

All in a day's work

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