I have a soft spot for Owen, just a small one, his heart is in the right place, just that his head is up his arse; he works as a commentator on the dreadful Independent so he can't be all good and the amount of exposure he gets on stuff like Question Time means that like Billy Bragg and Benjamin Poet, he is just another one of Power's licensed rebels, nothing wrong with being a Fool, I'm one myself but Owen isn't a fool such as I, he confines his foolery to nostalgifying about a mythical halcyon day, during which writers, playwrights, hacks like himself and politicians coalesced into a band of brothers whose sole purpose was dignifying their horny-handed brothers, ennobling the clothcap and the public bar, fighting the good fight, the rich writer in his castle, the poor labourer at his gate; nauseating, really, if a little easier to digest than today's cross-party spiverry. If only we could get back, he implied, last night, to the days when party politics was genuine and when artists were radical, that's all we have to do. As bad, in his own way as Michael Spit-Gove's educational back to the futurism, is Jones's longing for decent, transformative teevee.
Believing that things stayed still, something I find impossible to do, Owen wrote a proper, grown up book, Chavs, The Demonisation of the Working Class, which was a well-intentioned but belated study of spite; an examination of how skymadeupnewsandfilth, in all its guises, trashed and vilified the poor for their poverty. It's what I called, years ago, Cruelty TeeVee.
I remember, also, en passant, damning the cock-waving, class-traitoring, hypocrite lard bucket, John Prescott - one of Owen's tribe - for his use without irony of the term Underclass, the cheeky, fat, money-grubbing arsehole. Prescott, for his despicable Blair-stooging should be first on the People's Guillotine, followed by his Mrs; working class heroes, both.
In this televised lecture to a tame audience Owen earnestly damned programmes like Jeremy Kyle, Shameless and, well, I can't remember any more of his specific examples, even though I saw the programme less than twenty four hours ago, they could all, in any event, these series - Skint, was that one of them, variations, anyway, on scrutinising the benefit claimants' fecklessness - they could all have been written by whichever cunt wrote George Osborne's Weimar Republic Curtains speech.
In contrast with this shit and with soul-bludgeoning predictabilty, Owen cited Boys From The Black Stuff and God fucking help us, Cathy Come Home, as the twin pinnacles of social justice delivered via the idiot box. Oh, if only, Owen seemed to say, if only we lived in the good old bad old days, still, of Alan Bleasdale and Carla Lane and Jimmy McGovern and Jeremy Sandford. Jones's confirmation of the - non-existent - impact of Cathy Come Home was that lotsa people watched it, just as as they do Strictly Come Dancing. Quite a confused young man, actually, is Owen; ratings and social justice are not the same thing; the Ratings War, in which the PBC should never have engaged, is just one septic province of Murdoch's cultural colonisation, a signpost on Ruin's Highway; that Owen engages in its battles shows the paucity of his principles.
In contrast with this shit and with soul-bludgeoning predictabilty, Owen cited Boys From The Black Stuff and God fucking help us, Cathy Come Home, as the twin pinnacles of social justice delivered via the idiot box. Oh, if only, Owen seemed to say, if only we lived in the good old bad old days, still, of Alan Bleasdale and Carla Lane and Jimmy McGovern and Jeremy Sandford. Jones's confirmation of the - non-existent - impact of Cathy Come Home was that lotsa people watched it, just as as they do Strictly Come Dancing. Quite a confused young man, actually, is Owen; ratings and social justice are not the same thing; the Ratings War, in which the PBC should never have engaged, is just one septic province of Murdoch's cultural colonisation, a signpost on Ruin's Highway; that Owen engages in its battles shows the paucity of his principles.
The paradox, the contradiction in Jones's lecture - and I must say I could only bear to watch half of it, strolling about in his shirt he seemed like Ed Nobody-Miliband on speed
Give that man a Workers' Bafta.
- is that as the dogs in the street know, if all this wonderful, gripping, social realism docu-drama was worth more than a cup of piss then things wouldn't be as bad as they now are, would they?
Give that man a Workers' Bafta.
- is that as the dogs in the street know, if all this wonderful, gripping, social realism docu-drama was worth more than a cup of piss then things wouldn't be as bad as they now are, would they?
The fact of TeeVee's losing battle with the bewildering cornucopia of cyber devices is no consolation, all that stuff is worse, much worse, than Owen Jones's ossified sixth-form mewlings but I'm tired, nevertheless, bone-weary of telly moralists, tired of people who confuse - as does Jones - showbusiness with reality and would similarly and wilfully confuse me.
One of the biggest and most corrosive conspiracies of our time, uniquely of our time, is that of those working for skymadeupnewsandfilth, the PBC - whatever you want to call it - against those watching it. In acknowledging that, of course, jumped-up Wheldon song-and-dance lecturers like Owen Jones would be pissing in their own champagne. .
One of the biggest and most corrosive conspiracies of our time, uniquely of our time, is that of those working for skymadeupnewsandfilth, the PBC - whatever you want to call it - against those watching it. In acknowledging that, of course, jumped-up Wheldon song-and-dance lecturers like Owen Jones would be pissing in their own champagne. .
22 comments:
Indeed he would.
In the real world Mr Smith, how is dearest dogbloke settling in?
Owen Jones is a cunt. He is, as you say, just another Miliband. Just the right mix of empathy with the doletariate and glib soundbites to have a career at the Grauniad when Polly finally gets the hint and fucks off.
Jones, like a generation or more of Labour politicians, have no interest at all in helping the poor, the deprived, those living in hopeless dead-end ex-industrial shitholes to improve their lot. Quite the opposite. They want to keep them there. And keep them voting Labour. They really, really do because if they didn't they are the only political party who can point out some home truths without being accused of being 'out of touch' or 'patronising'. Naaah. Cunts like Jones are the real enemy of the chavs. And I don't think we should make any apologies for calling the fuckers 'chavs' either. If the Burberry cap fits.
Thanks, lilith, I am older now than when we first engaged with dogblokes past, what, twenty years ago, and more thoughtful about it all and Harris, I am glad to say, seems absolutely fine, considering the huge difference in his circumstances. All his obs, his poos, his appetite, his energy, his eyes, his teeth are near perfect, he is lively, affectionate and he's learning some words, he is our fourth Yorkie and he seems to have had a better start in life than the other three. I took him out for a pee at midnight and he started barking at the geese on the shore, defiant and proud and dominant, his bark in the still, starlit air, echoing back over the sea from the island across the Sound, about six miles away, was huge, Busterish, Rockyish, Frankieish.
I think that, rather like ourselves, the dogblokes are all one, under the skin, if we and they but knew it.
How's the new house, does it have a busy, crammed terraced garden, like the last?
It is that "quite the opposite" cynicism which so glaringly characterises the likes of Diane Lard. I try not be any kind of -ist, Otherness being my favourite -ness, sexism, racism, ageism, all those crimes of oppression pissing me right off but Diane Abbott really does engage my inner sexist pig; after a lifetime spent "representing" Tower Hamlets she is still proud to say that it is one of the shittiest constituencies in the country, for exactly the psephological advantage you mention, mr jgm2.
I am happy to call them chavs, if they are chavs and just as long as we realise that their genesis lies in the doctrines of the Thatcher spivs.
Mr I 'after a lifetime spent "representing" Tower Hamlets she is still proud to say that it is one of the shittiest constituencies in the country'. There's any number of Labour MPS who would be equally proud to make the same boast.
Any one of those fucking shitholes in Glasgow where people have the same life expectancy as comrade Bob's constituents in Harare. Hull, after a generation of representation by that useless cunt Prescott. Huge tracts of Liverpool. In fact any town where the cunts have got their feet under the safe-seat table.
There is not a single one of 'em who will stand up and say 'Come on, we've fucking poured money into your schools but they can't achieve anything if you don't get your shit together and read with them, sit with them, talk to them, show some fucking interest in them.' Naaah. Won't say it. Daren't say it because some other cunt will be all over them like a rash - 'You don't know what it's like...' and then describe some fucking nightmare that applies to 1% of the doletariate population thus excusing the other 99% for sitting on their arse with their hands out. 'It's moi roight innit'. 'I paid my stamp (even if you haven't)'. 'It's not fair..'
Cunts. And that cunt Owen is just another cunt mooching around trying to make himself the 'natural successor' to Polly so he can have a sinecure for life.
Polly Jones it is, then, hereabouts and hereinafter, 'sbout right.
Owen Jones is neither working class nor heroic. Just like Lennon.
I do like the idea of a 'People's Guillotine'. Very much.
Vincent.
Christ, for hundeds of miles the streets would run red, insufficient spikes in London to bear all the heads.......And Owen Jones, in his nit-picking, cheese-paring prevarications and qualifications and parentheses denies even the fantasticalised unrest and disquiet of the people voice. Eat the shit of our betters, such is our portion, whether our betters be ermine-clad or in dress-down chinos, they all have more in common with each other than they do with us.
I'm glad I started this; I wasn't quite sure where I stood on Jones but I am now. Oxbridge, isn't he, Monty Python, Hugh Grant, David Cameron, Steven Fry; a company of tens of thousands, les insufferables.
As has been mentioned, Ishmael passim, Politics is just shownizness and for young Mr Jones to talk total bollox with a sentimental oeuvre is just the next generation of arse warblers brought to us by networked access to TeeVee. He's Cameron without the Bullingdon, Miliband without the Commies, Clegg without his daddy (Cleggy whinged the other day about Cammo sorting an internship out for his chum's son with convenient amnesia that his dad boxed him off to Leon Briton's Euro office).
Sure he's an insincere and duplicitous cunt but talent and belief haven't had a look in for 30 years - the Miliband boys were fixed up with internships for Ken Livingstone, Cameron got the fucking Queen to phone CCHQ ffs. None of these cunts believe a word they say and any disagreement is either cosmetic or plotted into the rubric of potential wedge issues that, on reflection, are fucking irrelevant.
This Living Wage shit - who could disagree - except when it's calculated that Working Tax Credit is reduced by exactly the same amount - ergo, totally pointless - whey hey hey - let's campaign!
I don't mind Jones because he's just a talking head, same as Douglas Murray on the right - thick as fuck sensationalists who may have just about learned to tie their shoelaces; it's the cunts with power that scare me, I was gonna say elected but considering there's 1500 Lords 'n' Lurdeez now and fuck knows how many David Nicholson's, Lynne Homer's and Trevor Phillip's knocking about well, election's are just so old hat.
As long as Jones is nice to his mum he can just fuck right off, frankly - the queue for the guillotine would take a while to get to him and changing the blades after Prescott and Abbott would take a few minutes.
That's OK mr dtp but where we must take issue with Polly Jones is in the fact that whilst he is not elected, sorry, whilst he holds no political ofice. he is nevertheless in a position of influence in a position to lead a debate in the direction of Away. Away from the rank behemoth of party politcs, of vested interests spitting at each other in their endless game of musical chairs. An opportunity such as the Wheldon lecture could have led to the question: do Messrs Neil, Dimbleby, Paxman and Robinson really have million pound a year jobs for life and if so, why? Why is politics mediated and ameliorated to us through a handful of tossers making their living - and considerably more - in the very same business which they claim to scrutinise? Seems a fair question, seems an apt subject for a lecture, but we'll never hear it.
Fair points, well made - was focussing on the boy rather than the subject of his err..lecture, is that the word?
I don't know if TV demonises the poor but chucking Shameless in as an example kinda shows the lad hasn't watched much of it. And Jeremy Kyle I would have put as dumbing down rather than much to do with poverty as such - more a freak show than bias social commentary.
In the vein of why do these presenters get oodles of cash for what is a piss easy gig, why is Panorama so tiny these days, why is Newsnight worse than Ch4 news, where's Walden and the half hour interviews? Best you get these days is 10 minutes where the interviewee gets his party lines out and the interviewer tries their best to get them to deviate - it's just check list, itemised circle jerking.
They've relegated HardTalk to some obscure region of the World Service but they used to have Tim Sebastian and now Steven Sakhur doing full on well researched interrogations - surely to fuck we can forego an repeated episode of Flog It once in a while and chuck it on PBC1 but...
As you say, it doesn't sound like an opportunity missed but completely avoided.
I am afraid, mr dtp, that you, too, are deploying that Oh, Halcyon Day motif of Jones's. There never was a golden age of television, there has been the odd powerful documentary here and there, notably about the Filth's Frame-Ups, Panorama and Despatches have shone now and again. I flt that Walden was all about Walden, Frost all about Frost, only Robin Day did anything for me and that waasn't much. There has been a play, here and there, with hard truths to tell but their reforming impact has been zero, locked, as they were, between oceans of shit. And the vernacular of the hard-hitting interview has been well-learned by Sackur et al -Is he really, this time, going to call this one a cunt, he's getting close to it, will he do it, look out, he's behind you; it's pantomime, mr dtp, like the Today programme, why, if that gobby git, young parent, Humphreys, is such a terrifying inquisitor, do all the filthsters queue-up to go on the show with him? I repeat, all of those working on television are working against all of us who are not.
Odd thing, finally. I think that of all the dirt-cheap formulaic filler shows about food and property and antiques Paul Martin's Flog It is the best. He has a genuine, not a scripted knowledge of and enthusiasm for his subject and he has an agreeable nature, uncommonly polite and modest. Flog It was the first of these shows to integrate an element of social or industrial history and I, already deeply immersed in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, have learned much from some of the editions; that the floggers are generally arseholes, ditching amazing heirlooms for a few poxy quid is unfortunateley the crux of the matter, the show's raison d'etre and one of Ruin's shabbier devaluations.
Tim Wottacunt, however, the other one, he should be burned alive.
The great void ate my last comment, which was mostly about what utter scum are running the show, both in Downing Street and on the lunatic's lantern.
BBC is a massive problem. Without them most would never have heard of has-beens like Polly Twaddle and never-was's like Owen Jones. They wouldn't even have a job at the Grauniad if that 'institution' was not propped up by beeb and Gov job ads. Forcing people to license their televisions, on pain of imprisonment, is, frankly, fucking ridiculous, outrageous even, especially when the scum whose propaganda is being spewed on it claim the fee on exes.
The BBC should be downsized 90%, prevent from broadcasting anything but the most basic of political facts (this used to called 'The News') and an opt-out be made available for all those who do not wish to be forced to buy shit they haven't asked for and do not want.
If the BBC was a country, and its annual income was nominal GDP, it would be on a par with Monaco monetarily. Really.
Vincent
The PBC is, in the scale of its monstrousness, akin to 9/11, you need to step back and try to keep cool while examing the facts.
The decades and decades of institutionalised beasting of children which must have been known of by everyone, from the tealady to whichever shithead occupied the DG's Chair of Collusion; the flaunting of even the most basic rules on political partisanship by the likes of the shrieking, hunchback, transvestite Kirsty Wark, the corporation's willingness to purchase every trash faux-documentary made by Wark and her husband's personal production company, despite a High Court judge describing Mr Wark as deeply, deeply dishonourable. Wark's obstructive and diversionary involvement in the very early stages of the Gerry and Cilla McCann outrage. She is a walking rapsheet as long as your arm, Wark, must be due a damehood.
Then there is the representation of vastly overpaid and maladroit hacks like Jerry Paxman as journalists; of vulgar, arse- fixated rentagobs like Jonafun Woss being paid millions and millions of pounds basically for talking dirty, there is the sinecurising of the grotesque and contemptible Lord Pooh Bear Patten; the half a million bung to George Entwistle, a man who couldn't find his own arse; the useless, thieving bastard Mark Thompson and his inner-circle of cunts, bunging themselves millions. And all that is before you examine the utter bilge of their programming, the promotion of the foulmouthed degenerate, the tax avoider, the skinflint, the cokehead and the slapper, all, somehow, ennobling their vile, show-off selves through the monstrous Childen in Need. Aaahh, bless.
I call it MediaMinster because they are one and the same, parliament and the PBC; pimps, thieves, slags and nonces, all of them.
I'm not too sure i'm harking back to quality but certainly format - that TV isn't able to manipulated as it has been; where series are just never fucking ending, where soaps are God awful sub Daily Mail shite filled with anguish, abortion, violence and chavtastic crime, where freak shows are filled with fuckers who'd be best advised that paracetemol goes well with vodka and where interviews, fucking interviews, are nothing to do with the question but with the sound bite or its deconstruction.
Ofcourse it's not a ratings adrenaline rush but James Naughtie on Today asks questions which are so tediously longwinded and mastabatory that the answer is just a random fucking guess as to what the cunt's on about - if they get the chance to answer. That SNP thing today bolied down to not being able to offer a BBC chosen answer to what would happen if the Jocks weren't allowed the pound and as soon as one of the twats realised the SNP were holding back then that became the story - asked 4 times on PM, asked on Newsnight and I presume TWAO and any other PBC show and I feel violated, frankly. Sure it's a question but the answer's not important yet.
You can't fuck about with formats, you can't do drama in half hour spurts, you can't do political interviews in 5 or 10 minutes, you can't do interviews where the interviewer is the star, you can't do chat shows with razzamatazz. The Star's the fucking Star - don't they teach these fucks anything?
It may not be dumbing down, but it is, it's fucking up more so. I don't begrudge talking heads talking shite - it's a job and, as mentioned, fucking lucrative, I mind that it's gone to their head, I mind that they think they have the first fucking clue what they're on about. Obviously politicians are cunts and they've got better at being cunts but give the cunt a chance to answer the bullshit question asked before interrupting - I'm paying for the politician's bullshit and I want my quid's worth.
If it's a blame game - well I balme the editors and producers mainly - just stop trying to straddle tabloid & broadsheet - in 200 years of Fleet Street how come no one's managed it and for at least 20 years that's what 'quality' TV has totally failed to achieve and yet tediously and repetitively continues to strive for. What kind of youngster is gonna watch Newsnight because there's fancy fucking graphics or discussions on Lezzies ffs?
The PBC have fucked up TV & radio news broadcasting from what was pretty safe foundations - and that takes work. I guess I was thinking of salad days, back when news was news and reporting wasn't some cunt talking to another cunt - just tell me the fucking news - aaarrggghhh! Is it that fucking difficult - I don't give a fuck what Jeremy Bowen thinks or Robert Peston - what the fuck has happened in the news, ya bastards?
And a minor mae culpa for slagging off Flog It - err...never actually watched it - bad form, bad form!
There's a lot in there, mr dtp, thanks, much of which I am trying to resolve for myself in another post; it is to do with the attempted and largely successful infantilising of us all and with our active complicity in that project. We shall return to it shortly, further on up the road.
Bless new dogbloke's fierce heart. Bloody geese, who do they think they are? I am so glad he found you. We had a narrow escape here today..let the thick-but-fast dog out of the van and she nearly got a cat. Not the way to endear oneself to the relatively new neighbours.
The garden is a joy. It is 27'x 100' with a third as much again out front. A fairly blank canvas. We had to take down some rotting but young fruit trees our vendors had planted deep into raised beds and the rat infested chicken run and the 11 lawson cypresses they'd planted to obscure the view of the countryside. We have a surviving rowan :-) and an apple tree but both have been weirdly pruned. Yes I know. A pruned rowan. I think they wanted it to be a bush. We have plans for more trees in sensible places, espaliered against a sunny wall, a crab apple for jelly and blossom, a ginko, for the yellowness at this time of year. We were left a small greenhouse so managed more than 3 tomatoes this season :-) The foot path up the garden is on the wrong side and should really be a flower bed, so there is lots to do..it will keep us busy for years inshallah.
They get really excited about their questions, however off topic they might be, these celebrity radio presenters, don't they Dick? They like to think they are sharp. And then there is Richard Bacon. May you never be trapped in a room with Richard Bacon's radio program on a loop.
I think it was a National Rail dude who asked Naughie to 'could you repeat the question, please?' - good lad!
There's also been a 'if you want to answer your own question, i've got a train to catch' after an immediate interruption from a total mong of a Naughtie paragraph question. That was very funny.
He doesn't ever ask questions - it's just noise, he's vocal filler. But he's also a human shield - he can have anyone and he's always the bigger cunt. It's uncanny!
The garden sounds great, lilith, a gift; if someone had told me thirty years ago a) that I would be a gardener, BigTime - we planted a block of a thousand daffodils a little while back - or b)that that I would be told Herey'are, have as much morphine as you want - and didn't, I would've laughed at them, funny, now, the older I've become.
It's not so much the neighbours as the frightfully important commuter, dashing to his work, that was always my worry with the dogs - so much so that I have neither, now, neighbours or traffic. I can put up with the wind, to be rid of those two pestilential preoccupations.
In my experience the raised bed is not as easy nor as productive as claimed but maybe this is the wrong climate, maybe we just don't have enough time; we have about half a dozen and by the time you've dragged the manure down, and the endless weeding you just wonder whether or not the raised bed is just a token of GardenersWorldism. Christ, I hate that Monty Don. And Titmarsh. And Carol Klein. TeeVee slags, pretending that they're still gardeners. Don't start me talkikn' I'll tell, everything I know
The geese are noisy bastards amd they upset the pampered farmers, so the Italians come here on Fun-Killing holidays, blasting away, multi-bueno, burnishing their well-deserved reputation for heroism. I don't mind them as much as does Harris and I do love the sight of their noisy Flying Vees overhead.
Tried that bushing business with some ash, rowan and elder, mixed with thorns, privet and escalonia; it works after a few years but it never looks quite right, may be ok in ten years. Such fruit trees as we manage here are just for the blossom, even in Summer, the winds can be amazing.
Isn't there something of the public convenience about him, Naughtie? And in any event, any decent person would have taken sick leave and retired after calling the minister, Jeremy, a cunt, all over the national breakfast.
Look out, mr dtp, Naughtie is becoming your Clarkson.
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