Television is meddling with the very nature of Time

Does anyone else feel they’re being diddled out of their rightful allocation of Time?

I refer, of course, to rubbish television programmes. Mostly these are scheduled to last an hour. On commercial channels fifteen minutes of this hour is ads, fair enough. But much more insidious is the sneaky format of virtually all reality/lifestyle/documentary-type shows, whether its Four Nasty Buggers Cook Food and Bitch, or Pissed-Up Brit Yobs A-Pukin’ in Marbella, or even more upmarket fare such as S’ralan’s Apprentice or Gordon Ramsay Shouts at Fools.

The sneakiness, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is the business of starting the programme with a little highlights-package preview of what’s going to happen, then showing it happening, then ending with a highlights-package round-up of what happened.

Increasingly the more proletarian channels such as Living, Living +1, Just About Conscious and Cor Blimey! are taking this approach to dizzying, wheel-within-wheel levels of complexity: a preview of it happening, immediately it happens, then a preview of what will happen after the ads, then after the ads a reminder of what happened before the preview before the ads, then a preview of what will happen now, then it happening, then a talking head talking about how it felt when it happened, then a clip of it happening again, then another, different talking head telling you that it happened and adding “Oh my God”, then a round-up, repeat, ads, repeat, then a preview of what will happen next week, the end. After a while it is impossible to tell what is ‘really’ happening, and what is just a precursor, or a reminder, or a commentary on a precursor of a reminder.

The worst example I’ve ever encountered was a show featuring anti-sex campaigner and Brizzle boy Justin Lee Collins, in which he tried his hand at diving off the top board at the swimming pool. I assure you I only watched this feebly-conceived entertainment because the climactic top-board jumping competition took place at Kingswood Leisure Centre, formerly run by the Local Character, my nearest pool and perhaps the least glamorous location in the UK. The programme lasted an hour but, by the end, I calculated that if you removed the many previews, reminders and direct-to-camera wafflings, we saw approximately six and a half minutes of actual action. And what we did see was pretty darn thin. All of which puts me in mind of the old joke told by Woody Allen at the start of Annie Hall about the two old women in the restaurant: "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."

Gastro-Ossuary

I hope this isn’t too late to be entered into the Appleyard/Alsop architectural competition.

Inspired by Gaw’s account of the ossuary of Hythe Church, and mindful of the requirement that the building be ‘multi-purpose’, I noticed a gap in the market for some sort of mausoleum which also offers high-quality dining featuring locally-sourced organic produce. After intensive focus-grouping, I rejected both CharnelHouseSnackz and reliquary/BAR as brands in favour of the more direct 'Gastro-Ossuary' (pictured below).



90% of the seats in the Café-Bar (1) offer unrestricted views of the Ossuary (2), allowing diners (or, indeed, casual drinkers) to reflect on their mortality and corporeality as they sample the seasonal menu. The slaughterhouse (3) is situated upstairs and accessed via a central staircase (or lift for the disabled); or by the pig steps (5) from the organic free-range farm (4). The ‘Noseybonk’ crèche and play area (6) is separated from the slaughterhouse by the Hub (7), a vast black prohibitively-expensive marble oblong, which acts as a central focus-point for the whole building. The attic (8) can be used for storage or converted into two reasonable-sized double bedrooms.

Nine bowls of soup

In fact, that Heinz Tomato Soup - the finest of all tomatoey manifestations (and I am prepared to support that assertion with graphs, surveys and, if necessary, a surprising amount of physical violence) - is not even mentioned at the Guernsey Tomato Museum is indicative of the paucity of that attraction.

I suspected that the meh list would cause a stir, and hesitated a moment before including "most soups" in it, knowing full well that there was likely to be some sort of fallout. But I stand by it. I trust neither soup nor soup lovers. For one example, the failure of the ichthyosaur to mention exactly kind(s) of soup are contained in his nine bowls is just one of the loose ends which suggest that the official 'explanation' at the end of the following documentary is nothing more than a smokescreen for a much deeper and more sinister conspiracy. Judge for yourselves, please:

So, fireworks

... a bit 'meh' these days, no? Overexposure I expect. Even at the most extravagant display, five minutes is enough, isn't it?


I mean, I know lots of other things are a bit meh, such as A Question of Sport, Starbucks, religion vs atheism, most soups, the M6, jugglers, The X Factor, misconceived critiques of The X Factor, tennis, interest rates on savings, meerkats, the Government, poetry, ready-salted crisps, golf shoes, Esperanto, buying stuff, American Exceptionalism, ten-pin bowling, clothes from Next, movie car chases, lists of disparate things, documentaries about sharks, the last few series of Shameless, jogging, sandals, Leicester, brown rice, The Godfather Part III, apricot yoghurt, Punch and Judy, anything starting with the prefix 'Euro', lane swimming, DH Lawrence, gravel, Tuesdays, the eight times table, eating fish in restaurants, The Silmarillion, sweetcorn, Scotland and, in hindsight, the musical legacy of Michael Jackson, but fireworks seemed the most topical this weekend.

Everyone sang

It's always worth reading this, at least once a year anyway.

The Rolling Hill

So the next day, a Friday, braced and full of beans after Thursday’s thrilling blackberry-scrumping adventure in which I had unequivocally stuck it to The Man, I took a northward lane up the hill towards Lansdown.

By and by I happened upon the gate depicted below. I leaned there and gazed out across the valley.




The above picture deceives by flattening the hill. In reality, the gradient is fairly steep and – in a flash it struck me – eminently rollable. There was, I realised, absolutely nothing save societal convention, the fear of being observed and the odd cowpat to prevent me from leaping over the gate and tumbling, like a giddy child, down the grassy slope.

Once again I was faced with a test of my sense of adventure, of my capacity for devil-may-care spontaneity, perhaps even of my very manhood. I had passed the blackberry exam with flying colours, but would my determination to be master of my own destiny allow me to take this further, still more daring step?

I took a deep breath, and – do you know what I did? I thought ‘nah’, turned and walked down the lane, back to the office: a slinking failure, a simpering poltroon, a hollow man, a wretch.

The Warning Berry

This is a tale of thrilling recklessness. Last Thursday my lunchtime stroll took me, almost against my will, along lanes eastwards, eastwards, past the llama farm, down hill and up. In this direction lie the best blackberry bushes, though the season is on its knees and few edible specimens remain, just the odd over-soggy bloater or, saddest of all, the shrivelled black geriatrics, spent on the bramble, ripened and rotted without ever gracing so much as a crumble.

After a while the lane is abruptly interrupted by a locked gate (pictured below), which signals that hereafter it is a private road, and walkers may take themselves down a steep footpath to the right if they wish, or else turn back, or else go hang.




Sometimes I like to lean against this gate and ruminate, and I was doing exactly this when I noticed that just beyond it, in the private forbidden land, was a bramble adorned with the finest, juiciest-looking blackberries you could hope to see, certainly this late in the year. What a terrible waste it would be, I thought, if they were to shrivel unpicked and unappreciated. And all I needed to do to save them from this fate would be to jump over the gate and pick them.

So there I was, weighing up the ethics and analysing the cost-benefit ratio of a three-foot trespass, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted something unsettling. Balanced on top of the gate was a very big, fat, dead blackberry. (If you click the pic to full size you can probably make it out, about halfway between the right edge of the sign and the end of the gate). The sight sent a chill down my spine. Obviously it has been put there deliberately, but to what end or purpose?

I could only think that it was a Warning Berry, fulfilling much the same function vis-à-vis would-be blackberry-scrumpers, as did severed heads on stakes for potential invaders of ancient citadels.

This, clearly, was a test of my sense of adventure, of my capacity for derring-do, perhaps even of my very manhood.

It was too much to bear, it had to be done. I looked quickly about, girded my loins and, as if in a dream, I clambered over the fence, snaffled three of the choicest fruits, reclambered, and marched westward, westward, home to the safety of the office, with pounding heart and Judas Priest’s Breaking the Law on my lips.

But how were the stolen blackberries, you ask? Reader, they were above average.

The Guernsey Tomato Museum

By some distance the least impressive museum I have ever visited is the Tomato Museum on the island of Guernsey (mind you I haven’t yet been to Barometer World in Okehampton but some day, just you mark my words, I will).

I think I was about fourteen when we went, so you can imagine the impression a tomato-based attraction would have made on my adolescent mind. That’s right, none whatsoever. I don’t even like tomatoes. Nonetheless I found myself unaccountably reminded of it yesterday, as dusk settled sadly on Bristol’s GMT-darkened commute.

How to describe? I could mention the feebleness of the displays, the battered, uninformative signs purporting to enlighten the public on the practicalities of tomato-growing, the general dirt, the ill-kept greenhouses. The inadequate refreshment area. The toilets. The random additional attractions, including a plastic Wendy House shaped like a big shoe and a ragged huddle of obsolete arcade machines.

But merely listing these things cannot capture the feel of the place. So try to imagine, if you will, that you are a bright tomato-red balloon blown up for a jolly party, but the party is over, the marquee is packed away, the empty bottles are stacked and reeking, and you have been left to wrinkle and deflate in the rubble-strewn car park. And it’s raining, and there will never be any more parties ever again. That is the Guernsey Tomato Museum.

When Brit Jnr is a bit older I will of course take her to fun places such as Alton Towers and Disneyland and whatnot, but I think I should also insist on a visit to the Guernsey Tomato Museum, if it still exists.

“Life isn’t just Disneyland and Alton Towers”, I will tell her. “Look around you, Brit Jnr. Look around you and absorb this and think on it. This too is real. This too is life.”

“Can I have a pound for the machines?” she will say.

Is Gyles Brandreth nothing more than a dandified Pecksniff?

Did anyone else read Robert Harris giving Gyles Brandreth an absolute kicking in The Sunday Times, and think, Woah, steady on, Bob. What’s Gyles ever done to you? This is like punching Paddington Bear, or strangling Sooty. Surely there are more worthy candidates for a coldblooded character assassination than this harmless old hack, whose sole and modest ambition in life has been to give people who like doilies and macaroons a gentle chuckle?

The harshest you could say of Brandreth, surely, is that he is a bit of a name-dropping old ham. Perhaps a soporific milksop. You might even call him a namby-pamby flimflammer or a flummering fop, but surely no reasonable person would want to go so far as to suggest that he was a preening pansy or a simpering poltroon?

And yet in his review Harris calls Brandreth ‘tedious’ and ‘a creep’ and furthermore implies that the Countdown stalwart is a canting prig, a humbugging punchinello, a coxcomical poetaster and even a pontificating soi-disant.

This all strikes me as being a somewhat over-egged evisceration of a man who is, at the very worst, a waffling old creampuff.

***

Meanwhile, in a rather kinder review of Gyles’s diaries, Camilla Long extracts a typical anecdote in which Brandreth lunches with the Great Blogger himself, and which ends with the immortal line:

“I am never early. I am never late. I am Jeffrey Archer.”


Jeffrey Archer – now there’s a real c***.

Midwives

This occurred to me just over 12 weeks ago, and has re-occurred faintly since.

For those of you with offspring, when you found yourself in the dizzy environment of the delivery suite for the first time, did you get the unsettling feeling that all other activities and careers going on in the outside world, including yours, were trivial, even a bit silly, and that midwives and other related medicos and birth-mongers are the only people on the planet with real jobs?

On hating the only thing you’re good at

A nice piece in the Guardian here about the fact that Andre Agassi hated tennis.

It appeals to me, the somewhat tragic aspect of the sportsman who hates the only thing he can do. Other examples that spring to mind are Stan Collymore (football) and Chris Eubank (who used to regularly profess his loathing of boxing, but as with so much about the man, it was hard to tell to what extent this was a pose).

A much better example is Ronnie O’Sullivan, by some distance the most gifted snooker player ever. Some people actively dislike the man, but I think it’s a failure of empathy to damn O’Sullivan’s various brainstorms and mood-swings and lashings-out. He is a man in a very strange situation: he hates snooker. He is visibly bored and irritated by the prospect of having to poke all those frigging balls into the poxy little pockets over and over again. But he can’t do anything else and all of his peers envy his outrageous talent. And always the mediocrities, the keen tryers, the sad-acts who go on to make a living talking about this most trivial of pastimes, are endlessly nagging, nagging at him to knuckle down and be a ‘professional’.

But professionals are in many ways the bane of sport, the stodge. O’Sullivan is the only snookerist worth watching. That’s why, as well as being the most disliked player, he’s also the most popular.

A Hallowe'en tale

... from the archives.

Dissenters

The Arnolfini art gallery, of which I have been but am not currently a patron (despite its excellent bar), emails me with news of an exciting event in its season C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture:

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home - two adults and three children - proposes a holiday for autumn half-term. …Accompanied by eco-Au Pair Branka Cvjeticanin, they will set up an interim activist cell in Bristol with guest dissenters and visitors to take action against carbon, climate chaos and capitalism.

This leaves us with an interesting philosophical and/or semantic question: if every single artist and the government and most of the mainstream media agrees with you about carbon and climate change, can you justifiably describe yourself as a 'dissenter'?

Jane Elliott’s Hammer

Do you remember Jane Elliott? She was that terrifying teacher who divided her all-white class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed children to illustrate what it was like to be on the receiving end of racial discrimination. It was powerful stuff, almost unwatchable.

That famous progamme was made in Iowa in 1968. Amazingly, Elliott is still doing exactly the same thing forty years later. Last night Channel 4 featured her performing the exercise on a group of multi-ethnic British adults. Did it work in the modern context? No, it did not work, not at all. In an all-white class of Iowan schoolchildren, the eye colour divide would have been arbitrary; here it effectively put the whites (blue-eyed) in the oppressed role and the rest (brown-eyed) in the oppressor role, which made it look like some sort of revenge fantasy. And indeed it became clear that Elliott thinks that all whites are inherently racist, conditioned to feel superior from “even before they’re born”, and the purpose of the exercise was to make them see this and feel bad about it.

Time has not mellowed Elliott, it has made her madder (in both senses). The President of the United States is mixed race, but she doesn’t seem to think that the world has changed since Martin Luther King was murdered, or indeed, that there is such a thing as ‘mixed race’. She believes in reinforcing distinct racial categories: the pure whites and the rest. One chap in the brown-eyed group – himself mixed race - spoke about his concerns for his daughter (one-quarter black) if her schoolfriends found out about her ‘blackness’. Elliott made no comment about this, or whether the three-quarter white girl in question had been three-quarters conditioned to feel superior from even before she was born. Elliott’s vision of a post-racist world is one where the ‘whites’ are sufficiently racked with guilt and self-loathing that they’re basically too knackered to discriminate, rather than one where nobody gives a toss one way or the other about race because it has become unimportant as an identifier.

It was a sad thing to see. Elliott had one Big Idea in her life, which at the time was brave, brilliant and made her famous. She misunderstood her own Idea, and forty years later it has become a Very Bad Idea. But she’s still hammering away at it, hammering in the morning and in the evening and all over this land.

Talking of which, and on an otherwise completely unrelated note, read this humdinger of a Hoot.

Tortoises and hares

Here’s another good game for imposing simplified Platonic categories onto the chaotic mass of humanity: work types. I’ve carefully avoided business management books as best I can throughout my career, so I expect this has already been written about many times, but two broad categories of worker I’ve noticed are tortoises and hares.

It’s obvious enough: tortoises fill the 9 to 5 day with a steady, even distribution of work, while hares work in short furious bursts of super-activity interspersed with long periods of idle, almost braindead doziness.

(I’m so much at the hare end of the spectrum that it’s possibly bordering on mental illness. Certainly it’s a running joke in my office. uh oh, he’s off on one again. Back here Martpol suggested that I must be having a ‘quiet Friday afternoon’ on the grounds that I posted three ridiculous missives in a day. In fact the opposite is the case: you can be pretty sure that if ToE is busy then I’m also simultaneously banging away at numerous real work projects, plotting strange and unrealisable epic prose-poems, compiling a fantasy all-time cricket XI etc*; whereas if ToE is quiet, then picture me sitting staring into the middle distance without a thought in my head, drooling gently onto my collar, and pound to a penny you won't be far off the mark.)

I’m very lucky in that my job is ideally suited to haredom – project-based, unsupervised and based on results rather than clock-punching. For small businesses, getting hares in tortoise jobs and vice versa can be disastrous. A hare in a tortoise job will be slapdash and demoralised; a tortoise in a hare job will never get anything finished because they’ll endlessly try to perfect the minutiae.

It’s up to employers to get the right ones in the right jobs. The problem being, of course, that humanity is a chaotic mass and most people don’t fit neatly into the categories, being Hartoises and Tares and so on, which is why business management books never work and why this whole post was, ultimately, a bit of a waste of time. Still, we soldier on, we soldier on.

*That's another stupid myth, isn't it, that only women can multi-task?

Sail to the moon

Feeling a mite rootless, I wandered yesterday up the usual lunchtime lanes. It was a beautiful sunny autumnal day.

“What a beautiful sunny autumnal day it is,” I said to the local character, who was standing alongside his big horse. He agreed that it was. I often encounter this wizened ex-leisure centre manager on the lanes and we always have a chat about how he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I pat his dog and admire his horse, his cowboy hat and his exceptionally broad westcountry accent. “Some people loike to garn retoire to Spain or whartever and sit boi a pool orl day. Fair play to them but oi think you carn’t beat this. But everywon’s diffrent, would be a dull world otherwoise.”

We stood in our respective shoes, socks, trousers, shirts, jackets, hair and skin and looked out across the fields. Photons from the world hit the lenses of our eyes and were focused onto the photoreceptive rod and cone cells of our retinas.

It occurred to me that if, unlikely as it seems, the warmists are right, then all these green valleys could be underwater soon. But I was comforted by the presence of the ex-leisure centre manager. He seems a practical sort who would calmly solve the problem. In the flood he would probably build an ark, and sail us to the moon.