I am back at 10 O’Clock Live. When it isn’t live, you can again watch clips, like this one people like [NB: the final "...unless you count all those times they had a go at witches" is unforgivably omitted and archivists should note that what sounds like "Tory boys" is in fact "toy boys"]:
I am a proud member of Team Screenwipe 2011, the fruit of whose toil will soon be on BBC Four:
I popped over to Pudding Mill Lane at the weekend to see the preparations for 2012. Here are some snaps, as a cheesy iMovie export:
A piece about Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World for the BBC.
It’s also irrepressibly public-spirited, people shaking hands on the street are, apparently, ‘saying I love you’ – illustrated in the Attenborough video, oddly, by two hippopotamuses fighting each other in the Okavango river.
And this is not the first time What A Wonderful World’s generosity of spirit has been juxtaposed with less-than-cheerful imagery.
No room, sadly, for Armstrong’s 1957 refusal to join a goodwill visit to the Soviet Union, saying: “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.”
I made a thinkribution to The National Anthem, the first story in the Charlie-Brooker-yielded Channel 4 drama collection Black Mirror, but (a) barely perceptibly and so (b) you should watch it — with a caveat about adult themes.
I wrote for this Radio 4 programme, which was invented by @captainward and which you must listen to:
A rapid-response piece for the Guardian about Primal Scream’s outrage over being played at Conservative party conference:
“But whoever initially misidentified the music must have a tin ear. Bohemian Like You sounds like a Rolling Stones megamix with an emphasis on One Hit (To The Body) off Dirty Work, while Rocks sounds like a Stones megamix with an emphasis on Little T&A off Tattoo You.”
I am also compiling a Big List of all music played at all party conferences, politicians’ Desert Island Discs, etc. This will help.
English asparagus is back for a new autumn season; I test the spears and tips for the Guardian.
I have happy memories of every spear and tip I ate between St George’s Day and Midsummer’s Night, but as the ancient folk maxim has it: “Never eat asparagus while watching Strictly Come Dancing.” And contemplating eating asparagus in September, it struck me: the elation I feel when the vegetable appears is bound up with the way it heralds summer. Pondering the changing of the seasons at this time of year is likely to throw you into a panic over Christmas arrangements.
So I put Santa out of my mind and the spears onto a plate.
I’ve written a piece for the BBC about words beginning with “tw-”, and why people enjoy coining them on Twitter.
“Flick through a dictionary and you’ll notice something about the English language’s ‘tw’ words. We have a few related to ‘two’: twin, twelfth, twilight and so on. And there’s a tiny minority of what you might call fairly sensible words: tweezers, twig and of course tweed.
“The rest, though, tend to be of a type that’s more playful or, depending on taste, more grating. ‘Tw-’ words can be about inanity or ignorance: twit, twerp, twonk or twaddle. They can suggest lightness, smallness or delicacy: tweak, twiddle or twinkle. Or they can flag up that you’re being self-consciously old-fashioned: ’twas and ’twere; ‘twixt and ‘tween. All very twee.”
Sadly there was no room for the etymology of “twonk” – coined/popularised, according to the Telegraph, by John Sullivan to give Del Boy a non-sweary swear word; nor for gay slang “twink” (“with a slender build, little or no body hair, and no facial hair”).
Also, now that we know that “twilight” relates to “two”, why not let’s enjoy some twilights I’ve seen?
I’ve started a blog about the fun of doing cryptic crosswords at the Guardian. The first post is now live:
“Others suggest [that] those of us hooked on crosswords might want to justify the time passed by pointing to the large vocabulary we’ve amassed – or, perhaps, to our pleonasm, to our Brobdingnagian prolixity. Well, boo-poo to that. (I admit I enjoyed learning the word ‘pleach’ from last Tuesday’s Times, but it may be many years until I get to use it in a sentence near a hedge.)”
It’ll be a mixture of the week’s best and funniest clues, tips for n00bs and features on awesome stuff like when crosswords feature in programmes like Rubicon and The Hour.
As the countdown to the 2012 Olympics kicks off with an unlikely theme song, I look London Calling and its zombies and heroin for the BBC.
“The Clash were supporters of pirate radio and considered launching their own station; this love song to the wireless signal recounts what, in punk terms, is up-to-the-minute and truthful news. But it isn’t saying ‘come and enjoy the canoe slalom’.”
Major hoorays to Marcus Gray’s Route 19 Revisited for the key fact that London Calling was originally inspired by Joe Strummer’s dislike of sports fans visiting London, as he explained to Kosmo Vinyl (Clash On Broadway box set booklet, 1991). Awkward [Update [1 Aug]: Praise be! Route 19 is imminently in paperback. There is nothing more interesting to say about 1979; I know – I tried! Buy it – it is The One.]
Sadly there was no space to mention Clash fan of Indian origin Harraj Mann, questioned in 2006 under the Terrorism Act after a taxi driver taking him to Heathrow airport became alarmed that he was listening to London Calling and called the police. The incident was seen as a massive overreaction, suggesting either that the song has lost its incendiary power, or that the authorities were being over-cautious – or both.
Also neglected was the way Strummer starts “doing” Tommy Steele’s Singing The Blues at the end (“I’ve never felt so much a-like…”), never better described than by Tom Ewing: “No consonant is safe with Steele around, words pool into one another in a shrugged gush of pre-meditated moodiness.”
Update [30 Jul]: Here is wireless nabob Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday yakking with me (see also NPR’s blog The Record):
If Anders Breivik has just printed off the internet, maybe we shouldn’t make too much of his manifesto just yet.
Among the blogs I read every day is My Right-Wing Dad, where appalled young American Democrats share emails they’ve received from relatives who have done the “FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!” thing. Among the icky racist cartoons and the odd genuinely funny bulletin-board-style gag are volumes of interminable implausible “research” about Bad People.
It’s the type of content that’s sometimes neither visible on the normal old web, nor hidden in the darknet: the stuff that pings in and out of inboxes, across forums and onto Yahoo! Groups. And if you’ve read that stuff too, Anders Behring Breivik’s “manifesto” must seem drearily familiar.
Why, you might otherwise wonder, would a Norwegian who claims an affinity with England write with the rhythms and cadences of amateur American net culture? And why is he so interested in the 1980s curriculum at Stanford University? The answer may be that Breivik didn’t so much “write” much of what he calls his “book” as copy, paste and twiddle. If you’re fascinated by plagiarism – I know I am – the twiddling will be familiar too – find/replacing terms throughout, the odd rejigging of sentences at the top of paragraphs to leave an apparently new document, still leaving inconsistency in tone, spelling and style.
Hulking chunks of the document come with attributions, and the latte wing of the UK twitterverse is currently sharing mentions of Jeremy Clarkson, Melanie Phillips and other apparent provocateurs; simultaneously scary and pathetic is the amount that should be attributed, but isn’t.
The lengthy “how the world is” section, for example, is a barely-finessed paste of a 2005 report called Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology by American think-tank the Free Congress Foundation; Life Site News hosts what appears to be the original. Breivik might have found it all together, or in the various forms it’s been scattered across the net.
Here’s an extract from Chapter 1, What is “Political Correctness”? by William S. Lind, apparently a military pundit and sometime senatorial aide:
And here’s Breivik, changing the location to Europe:
From Chapter 2, The Historical Roots of “Political Correctness” by Raymond V. Raehn, apparently a strategist:
And Breivik:
Finally for now, here’s the end of Chapter 3, Political Correctness in Higher Education by T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr, apparently a Reagan aide:
And, again, with a transatlantic transplant:
If this really took Brievik nine years, someone should have told him about CRTL+C; CRTL+V. You don’t need to type it all back in again. “Nine years” is a great line to get attention, but not one to be repeated without a bit of scepticism.
There’s plenty more, of course: Unabomber borrowings; reading lists cribbed from university courses, inevitable Wikipedia scrapes, and a critique of mass media seemingly lifted from an old leftish site after the removal of an approving reference to a John Pilger programme about Palestine. If you’ve ever said to yourself, “what a world we live in!”, you’ll probably shudder as you find something you agree with: even the bonkers end of the net is right at least twice a day.
It looks at the moment as if Breivik is positioning his murders as a kind of “marketing” for these pages of bilge, hoping they’ll be translated and read across the globe. So here’s the thing.
We should bear in mind that Brievik hasn’t, as some reports have it, proved himself “articulate”, or “well-read”, or some kind of intellectual mastermind. There’s little in his manifesto that couldn’t be produced after an all-nighter on the net hopped up on meds. There are, let’s say, plenty of self-published first-time authors whose work deserves more serious attention.
The manifesto might contain technical clues of use to the police; it might contain political or philosophical clues as to why he did what he did. I’d be fascinated if it did, but I don’t know, and neither do you.
Perhaps Boris Johnson is right, and this is a story about “a narcissist and egomaniac who could not cope with being snubbed” by a girl “in favour of a man of Pakistani origin”; perhaps anti-conservative commentators are right that the amount of hate-text and fear-screeds already published are necessary or sufficient for acts of terrorism. It’s – obv – far too early to say.
But it’s not too early to say that Breivik is trying to build up his pontification in court today in the hope that international media will handle it like an evil genius’s plot-changing scene in a thriller rather than a mish-mash of other people’s wibble. That would seem to be missing the point and playing a loser’s game.
Above is an image of “Jonnie Marbles” getting handcuffed outside the Wilson Room in Parliament. Below are images of the rest of us in the room being ejected. Here’s why everyone there found the stunt infuriating:
Then, at just after ten to five, it was all over. An amazing, inspiring event ceased to exist as a piece of public property. I’d even missed the affray itself, because I was incredibly preoccupied with another bag-holder behind me, who had also stood up and seemed to be working his way round from the other side. Next we shuffled around as per the coppers’ yelled instructions, before eventually and sullenly trudging down the corridor to join Jemima Khan in the Boothroyd Room, cursing Jonnie Marbles. The committee was on the screens there, but what’s the point of watching something on TV if you have to remain decently dressed and you can’t even nip off to get a sandwich during another of Murdoch Jnr’s sixty-second dashes?
Finally, the speculation started again, including the inventive theory that News Corp had put the jackass up to it. “Because,” a punter noted, “that was the best thing to happen to Rupert Murdoch all day.”
Radio 4 listeners have chosen Queen’s opera-headbanger as their favourite Desert Island piece of pop; I explain all in a feature for the BBC News Magazine, What is a Bohemian Rhapsody?:
“Freddie Mercury used a piano as the headboard of his bed. The double-jointed Mercury would awake with inspiration, reach up and back behind his head and play what he’d heard in his dreams. This was how Bohemian Rhapsody began.”
Update [22 Jun]: Here is Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday yakking with me about Bismillah and Scaramouche:
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Day 64 and the end of the English asparagus season approaches, bitterly early. I have been eating the recommendations of Guardian readers and I offer my findings in a new piece headlined Tears For Spears.
“[P]eople ask coyly about the, um, after-smell. I’ll spare excess detail [but] I welcome it as a reminder of a glorious meal. Everyone’s smells, incidentally, but not everyone can smell it. It’s better to avoid picturing the medical research that led to that finding.”
The experiment is enough to give Comment Is Free users a good name.
Inspired by my own article about Google-proofing the pub quiz, I am resurrecting Just The Gist.
This was – and now is again – a music quiz where you guess the song title based on a precis of its narrative content. This is a “soft launch”. Later, there might be themes and prizes and that.
Inevitably, it takes place on Twitter: @justthegist.
Update 1 July: Answers, archives, video and extra at the Just The Gist tumblelog.
I’ve written a feature for the BBC News Magazine about how pub quizzes can survive the smartphone era.
“Text-messaging Is Destroying the Pub Quiz As We Know It, noted the Super Furry Animals in 2001. Little did they know that the pub quiz of 2011 would start with the host insisting: ‘OK, iPhones away, please. Yes, very clever – and Androids. All phones away.’
“Cheating has always been possible in pub quizzes. But while once the dishonest quizzer had to pop out to phone a friend, or wait for a text message reply, phones with fast internet access have taken cheating possibilities to a new level.”
I eat English asparagus every day in season. I have asked readers of the Guardian to help by suggesting recipes.
“I was able to avoid this punitive pricing, having heard that a pick-your-own 20 minutes from my home was planning a one-off ‘early Sunday’. Thrilling, certainly, and less than half the price of the supermarkets, but also tense. Word was sure to have spread – would the early crop be abundant enough? There were already nine other cars queueing 20 minutes before opening and the mood was edgier than a crack den in a power cut.
“Once the gate had opened and we were picking, one pensioner made the mistake of switching rows halfway. If it had been one of those farms that offers pickers miniature serrated scythes, he’d have perished among the remaining stumps.”
Update [13 Jun]: The results are in.
I’ve been working as a writer and producer on Channel 4′s 10 O’Clock Live. When it isn’t live, you can watch clips, like this:
I made an audio slideshow for the BBC about this year’s X Factor-botherer, 4.33. Headphones recommended, and you have to click on the link or image to get there.
