- A knighthood for John Scarlett, current head of MI6 and Hutton Enquiry participant. And James Dyson, right after he outsourced all his production to China.
- Peter Greenaway gets a CBE, and Hugh Laurie gets an OBE.
- So, however, do Rod Stewart, Steven Gerrard, and the FA’s David Davies.
- “46% of those on the New Year list had been nominated or supported by members of the public.” [source: BBC News] If so, oh dear.
Category: Media
TV, Internet news, Web 2.0 and anything that doesn’t fit into the other categories.
James Brown has died.
As the Tom Tom Club nearly put it: he was the Godfather of Soul, you know, so check it out.
And if there wasn’t James Brown, there wouldn’t be a “Funky Drummer” sample and there’s so much hip-hop that would simply not have happened without him; without soul and funk samples, after all, a lot of music wouldn’t have happened at all, especially stuff like “Paul’s Boutique” or “Endtroducing”. It’s a great loss to music. Besides, anyone in The Blues Brothers deserves our lasting respect.
Good news for comedy fans everywhere!
Out of the Trees (a sketch show written by Douglas Adams and Graham Chapman, shown once in a dead BBC2 slot in 1975) has been found by the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped, having been taped at the time by Graham Chapman’s partner on an antiquated pre-Beta video system. People have now seen it, but unfortunately I’m not in London – I’d have given a lot to have been able to. And the BFI don’t tour with this, as far as I’m aware. Damn.
Hopefully the BBC will be smart enough to put it as an extra on a Hitchhikers or Python release, because this really does need to be seen – there’s apparently a lot of decent material on it beyond the small exerpts that have survived before, and besides it’s Adams and Chapman.
What’s more, Out of the Trees‘ reappearance after thirty years since its deletion gives hope that all those Hartnell and Troughton Doctor Who, the second Nigel Kneale 1984, Hardwicke House beyond episode two, Not Only But Also, the second series of Dad’s Army and all those lost Beatles/Stones/etc TV appearances that the BBC felt that it had to junk for “cost saving” might just turn up in a barn somewhere. We’ve already come far with this and the currently recovered Doctor Whos, so TV fans everywhere can only hope that this trend towards rediscovery continues.
[And if you have the bootleg tape of the full Hardwicke House – that is, beyond episode one and two – that is currently rumoured to exist, we’re all anxious to hear from you. Just thought it was worth a try.]
Rejoice!
The News of the World’s ex-royal editor has been convicted for voicemail hacking. Amongst the people hacked: Prince William’s aides, Simon Hughes, Elle Macpherson, and best of all, Max Clifford.
You couldn’t make it up, could you?
Advice for The Sun (they love it, no really)
If you headline a story this way (not the David Gest one):
Don’t be surprised if someone checks to see if you own it, finds that you don’t, registers it and then uses it against you (linked to the Sun Page 3 website on an 18-year old model’s leering profile.) Nice one, anonymous Popbitch reader.
And what’s it with the use of that Sarah Payne photo right now? It was even on the front of the Guardian this morning. It’s just a form of crude emotional blackmail really, and this kind of story is too important for that. But with our media climate the way it is, at least we can have a laugh sometimes.
[via Media Guardian diary, 17 November 2006, free registration required.]
Edit: Oh well, qwghlm got there before me. Much more interesting detail (including the link to the relevant Popbitch thread) there.
Al-Jazeera’s famed attention to detail
Maybe if you’re launching an English version of your popular foreign language news channel, you should make sure that your promotional campaign can spell “satellite” correctly:
[Click on the image for the full advert.]
It’s too amusing to excuse such errors, really; if you’re buying a half page in a major newspaper (admittedly in this case the Guardian) you really should know better than to let it go out without a full proof-read. Let’s hope their news quality is much, much better.
History repeating
One of the most famous denigrating myths about a rock star is Phil Collins divorcing his (second) wife “by fax”; it wasn’t exactly the divorce, but it was ugly and it did end up in the Sun.
Interestingly, something similar has now happened, entirely for real: Britney Spears told her husband she was divorcing him by Blackberry. And, this being the modern era, the video’s on YouTube. Don’t you just love watching history in the making?
It’s a wonder how Britney manages to stage-manage this stuff perfectly: just when her husband is promoting his bandwagon-jumping worthless hip-hop album, and just after she’s had a second kid, she dumps him. And, of course, she’s got interest all over the Internet because Federline has always been seen as a hanging coat-tail; now she’s Fed-less, she’s got promotion for her upcoming album, he’s got promotion for his, she gets the kids, he gets paid off, they’re happy. You’ve got to admire the gall.
One wonders what exactly those fundamentalists are on about when they talk about sanctity of heterosexual marriage, though.
Heads up in the digital milieu #1: 25 October 2006
[The first in a semi-recurring series of good things spotted in the little minutiae of British multichannel TV listings, inspired by spotting an interesting for-cinema documentary on a digital channel soon after release…]
- “KZ“, a documentary about Mauthausen concentration camp and the townspeople Then and Now, has recently done the art cinema rounds and is already on TV: More4 9:00pm (+1 10:00pm).
- The first two episodes of “Torchwood” air on terrestrial; I saw it on BBC3 and didn’t actually mind it, it looks promising and is at least interesting: BBC2 9:00pm.
- Channel Four are having an early Halloween – “Misery” followed by Carpenter’s “The Fog“: Channel 4 11:10pm/Thu 1:10am.
With over 100 channels on Telewest Essential, this had better become a regular occurrence.
Rockstar go for the win
Now, I’ve written about the Bully/Canis Canem Edit “controversy” before. The game’s ‘out’ now, and it’s apparently OK (although it apparently has one of those terrible Stealth Missions that plague too many games right now). That’s not the point here, though.
What have Rockstar managed to get into the game that shouldn’t be controversial but somehow is? Well, they’ve built in a sideline teenage dating simulation that just so happens not to care about the sex of the kids doing the dating (which, of course, is something that you choose to do). So, of course, all the usual press is outraged at how Rockstar managed to get sexual content (well, kissing) into a ‘T’ rated game – missing the point that it’s mentioned on the back cover – and outraged about how your character could be gay or bi if you wanted him to be.
Wonderful. Now that’s comedy – this controversy is something I can entirely get behind Rockstar for, it’s entirely a player issue. It’s odd that this could well be the big issue of the game, though, when it’s the only real one Rockstar’s right on (and The Sims can do exactly the same thing), but that’s the press for you.
Daily Star ignorant; sun comes up in morning
Courtesy Media Guardian (free registration may be required):
The Daily Star last night pulled a page that mocked Muslim law by turning the tabloid into the “Daily Fatwa” following a newsroom revolt.
Well, doesn’t sound too promising from the title; sounds suspiciously like someone’s trying to be funny and failing miserably. Any details?
The page included a “Page 3 burqa babes special” showing a woman in a niqab, as part of a feature billed as “How your favourite paper would look under Muslim law”.
The page also contained a blank editorial stamped with the words “censored” and “Allah is great” while across the top of the page were the words “no news no goss no fun”.
A competition told readers to “Burn a flag and win a Corsa”, while a picture of the US president, George Bush, was accompanied by a caption “death to infidels”.
Oh dear. Not going into the complexities of Islamic law, but it does vary heavily based on religious interpretation; viz-a-viz the differences between Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at one end and the UAE on the other. Yesterday’s Guardian had a fine article in G2 by Zaiba Malik, who wore the niqab (Taliban-style one-fit full-cover garment) for the day, experienced the usual racism and despite trying hard didn’t find anyone else wearing it; she points out Quranic verses defending her non-niqab position.
One can safely surmise that whoever did write the Star article was, at the very least, a total fool, but glad to see that Star journos had the sense to use the union to right the wrong. It sounds very much like poor inaccurate stereotyping of the sort that simply pisses people off and gladdens the hearts of racists and other idiots. There are many valid reasons to criticise fundamentalist Islam, many of them the same as the reasons I criticise fundamentalist Christianity, but these aren’t them.
