Tonight show stitch-up

Following Welsh rugby captain Gareth Thomas’s courageous self-outing there is an interesting television documentary to be made about the reasons that professional sport lags behind the rest of society in its toleration of homosexuality. Unfortunately, last night’s Tonight programme, Afraid to be Gay wasn’t it. The ITV show instead attempted to prove that society is still intolerant of homosexuals by using precisely the same disingenuous tactic employed by Panorama to prove that Britain is still racist.

They took a couple of pretty gays, dressed them in tweedy boyband suits and Jedward haircuts and with hidden cameras followed them parading about the streets holding hands and snogging, until they had collected enough footage of name-calling from male teenagers to ‘shock’ us. The ITV producers performed this stunt not in London or another metropolis where the sight of a gay couple wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow; but in Wigan town centre, carefully selected for being a chav hotbed. In other words, they went fishing for idiots in a pond swarming with them and, not surprisingly, they caught a few. In Wigan town centre, merely sporting spectacles and wearing anything other than trackie bottoms and a crew cut will be more than sufficient to elicit name-calling from teenage male chavs; the snogging was quite unnecessary.

The treatment of the lost British white underclass is a national disgrace. Ignored by the political class, especially Labour which should be its champion, it has been left to stew and turn septic in a hopeless, inescapable swamp of welfare dependency and lawlessness. I hope this is what Cameron-Clegg mean when they talk about ‘deep social problems’. The chav-fishing method employed by Panorama and now Tonight says precisely nothing about our national attitude to race and sexual orientation – which by any reasonable comparison either to previous decades or to other nations, is exceptionally tolerant – but everything about the media class’s attitude to the white poor. They are either exploited and dehumanised by Jeremy Kyle or vilified by the London hipsters for hate crimes, and every year the chasm between the underclass and the rest of us widens, and the prospect of any particular poor boy or girl successfully leaping it diminishes.

Fanatics (three different ones)

I have a horrible feeling that the party-fanatical elements of Lib and Lab think they really can form a Losers' Coalition which, because it is 'progressive' and therefore Good, has the moral legitimacy to run the country. This is very disconcerting.

I have in recent days been much disconcerted by fanatics. Fanatics are identifiable by their humourlessness, an intense stare and a conviction that not being 100% with them is being 100% against them. These are people for whom every conversation is a full-on, look-me-in-the-eyes discussion; at their homes you couldn’t just doss around watching telly, making idle chit-chat and cracking wise, you’d have to always be engaging. Fanatics wouldn’t be that bothered if you were killed, if you were also wrong. They end up fried and full of hate.

Alastair Campbell is a very frightening man; not because of his bullying nature or political intelligence, but because he isn’t fully human. Here (via Sean), is Adam Boulton finally losing patience with him. It does no good, of course.




And then there is Caroline Lucas MP. At this election Parliament lost its Respect MP but gained a Green one. It’s much the same thing. Lucas is particularly disconcerting because she is so obviously a Type: her vocal intonations, joyless haircut, even her feline eyes and cheekbones – you can tell everything about her straight away. This is rare and unsettling. Such people are usually the dictators of odd little radical committees that meet in art centre cafés or backrooms in libraries; they don’t normally win Parliamentary elections.





Finally, good old Dickie Dawkins, the man who equates every criticism of his own personal views with a direct attack on the entire history, method and project of science, believes that we should immediately have another election under a system of proportional representation. Well he just would, wouldn’t he?

Mary Beard, historians and evil

Not often that someone provokes me to swear at Desert Island Discs, but Mary Beard, the Cambridge Professor of Classics, managed it today by repeating her views on the 9/11 terrorist attacks (In case you need reminding, she was the one who wrote: This wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. ..World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price).

A couple of things have become increasingly clear to me in recent years:

First, that academia is where society puts its idiots in an attempt to minimise the harm they can do.

Second, that professional historians are not, as they usually think they are, better qualified than the rest of us to pronounce on current affairs because they see them ‘in context’. I do hate it when historians, usually Starkey or Schama, come on telly to talk about Gordon Brown and say, with a dismissive wave, that “of course we’ve been through all this before in Henry VIII’s day” (or whenever their specialism happens to be). In fact, all they are doing is what everyone else does: giving their personal opinion. They interpret both the contemporary and the selected historical narratives to fit their purpose. (In this case, Beard compares US ‘imperialism’ with the Roman Empire, her specialism.)

Beard’s original “article” – which, amongst worse offences, puts the word “terrorists” in scare quotes - was written just three days after the 9/11 attacks and published a few weeks later. Pressed on it now, it seems that Beard believes the worst that can be said of it is that her timing was a bit tactless. But the evil of her views, now so banally and gently expressed, only becomes more vivid with the years, as the excuse of a thoughtless knee-jerk reaction has passed. She did not take the opportunity to acknowledge that the targets and the victims of the 9/11 attacks were not US “imperialists” or Government policymakers, but civilians and the families they left behind. Ongoing, nearly all of the victims of Al Qaeda terrorism (or “terrorism” as Beard would have it) are Muslim civilians.

The worst commentariat reactions to 9/11 – namely conspiracy theorising and the Mary Beard/Ward Churchill school of leftist cant – continue to appal and provoke swearing at the radio nearly a decade on.

If someone consistently says evil things, is the fact that they really believe themselves morally right an excuse? Is stupidity an excuse? On balance, probably not, at least in this case. Beard’s statements are unequivocally evil – certainly as evil, in their way, as Pat Robertson’s views on Haiti. Given that she’s still professing them, I think we can reasonably say that Mary Beard is in a particular way evil, and in a more general way stupid.

Poetry is rubbish 2: Impeach Duffy

Is it possible to impeach a Poet Laureate? Read Carol Ann Duffy’s 12 Days of Christmas effort and weep. This is probably the worst verse of a pretty shocking bunch:

THE FIRST GOLD RING WAS GOLD INDEED –
bankers' profits fired in greed.

The second ring outshone the sun,
fuelled by carbon, doused by none.

Ring three was black gold, O for oil –
a serpent swallowing its tail.

The fourth ring was Celebrity;
Fool's Gold, winking on TV.

Ring five, religion's halo, slipped –
a blind for eyes or gag for lips.

Capitalism, oil, warmenism, s’lebs and some anti-religionism. Elsewhere there’s a lot of the old soldier-as-victim routine.

This is ‘poetry’ as a set of banal soundbites from the student section of the Question Time audience. It’s poetry about ishoos.

The Laureate’s job is to write about Britain. Britain is not made of issues, it is made of people and places and things and time. If you can’t find something worthwhile or memorable to write about in there, then don’t take the post. Anyone could write this kind of ishoos crap from outside the Laureateship. And they do, mostly as GCSE coursework.

Duffy is abusing the post. The Impeachment campaign starts here.

Panorama stitch-up

“Tonight’s Panorama,” intoned Jeremy Vine in his Most Serious Voice, “will be an eye-opener for anyone who says that Britain has become a more racially tolerant place.”

Well it was revealing, but not for that reason. Here was the plot: a pair of Mancunian Asian undercover reporters decide to make a Panorama programme about racist bullying, so they rent a house in Southmead, the roughest estate in Bristol, and walk around the streets for two months in full Muslim gear seeking out racist bullies to be racially bullied by, until they have accumulated enough footage of racist bullying to make a half-hour Panorama programme about racist bullying. Cue handwringing headline: Britian is still racist! Or, on our local BBC news: Bristol is still racist! Or in the Community Meeting featured in depth on our local news: Southmead is still racist!

Except of course they weren’t bullied by Britain, or by Bristol, or even by Southmead, all of which are chock-full of non-racists; many, many more non-racists than there used to be 20 years ago. They were bullied by a small gang of vile, feral chav kids. I’ve no idea why the Panorama reporters thought there was anything special about their race or religion in this. Small gangs of vile, feral chav kids will be vile to you and make your life a misery if you’re Muslim, black, Chinese, ginger, disabled in any way, or just vaguely middle class-looking.

The revelation of the programme, of course, was the true depth of the liberal, socialist BBC Guardianista's loathing of the white underclass. The only real-life victims on camera were not the undercover Asian reporters (they were actors from Manchester), but the white kids, born without any sense of self-worth into a system of hopeless, circling welfare-dependency. The undercover reporters have now left Southmead and gone back to their real homes. The chavs are still there, and in a few years they’ll be churning out another generation of self-loathing, vile, bullied, bullying, hopeless welfare-dependent chavs into the system created and supported by the liberal, socialist BBC Guardianistas who will then send spies to make more television programmes about how awful and intolerant they are.

Why I do not approve of grey jogging bottoms

The grey jogging bottom is amongst the leading sartorial eyesores to be found on Britain’s highways and byways. Professional tailors are wont to physically cringe and whimper upon encountering a pair, and even the lay observer may find himself blenching when, from the window of his Audi or the comfort of his Starbucks armchair, he spots a set of them flouching to the newsagent or taking a bulldog for a walk.

Why, only this very morning my eyes were assaulted by the sight of a pair of grey jogging bottoms. Sagging baggily beneath some sort of hooded jumper and above a brace of white running shoes, they loosely encased the legs of a gentleman in early middle-age. He was chaperoning his children to school and in the contrast with their smart uniforms one could almost fancy that the respective clothing of adult and minor had somehow been magically shrunk, grown and switched by some mischevous demon.

Thus the infantilisation of Western culture. Thus the emasculation of Modern Man. Thus the decline of the once-great British Empire: from the pantaloon to the breech, from the breech to the spat, to the trouser, the slack, the chino, the jean and, at last, the bottom.

And that, to summarise, is why I do not approve of grey jogging bottoms.

The Weeping Episode

Last year on the Yard I wrote in praise of The X-Factor. Yeah, well I now come to bury it. On Sunday, for various inexcusable reasons, I saw that nasty episode between the end of the Boot Camp stage and the beginning of the interminable Live in the Studio stage, which isn’t but ought to be called The Weeping Episode.

It’s the one where the various judges take six hopefuls each to some exotic location and whittle them down to three apiece. The hopefuls are tortured in tellyland’s usual style: made to wait around in a state of funk for ages while the judges ‘deliberate’, then given the news in double and triple bluffs (At first I was very impressed with you… but now I’m very sorry to say that…you’re not going home because you’ve made it through!).

Before the judgements are delivered the contestants weep because it all ‘means so much to them’. After the judgements the losers weep because they haven’t made it through and, conversely, the winners weep because they have. All of the men weep these days, even the judges, and the women howl like banshees. Nobody takes it well.

I had previously suspected the Weeping Episode was unnecessarily exploitative, even by reality TV standards. Since we’re months away from the finishing line, by which time these early fallers will all be long forgotten, why do we need to see them being tortured and crushed? But then I also thought: well, they know what they’re getting into by choosing to appear on it. And they only weep so much because they saw contestants weeping last year; they don’t really invest all their pitiful hopes and dreams on the huge improbability of winning, do they – surely that’s just something they say? And surely they’ve realised by now that even winning the whole thing is no guarantee of lasting success?

Sadly not. One of the failures in this year’s Weeping Episode was one Daniel Pearce, a 31-year old father of two from Kent, who, seven years ago, was successful enough on Popstars: The Rivals (the X-Factor precursor that also spawned Girls Aloud) to make it into the boyband One True Voice. The band and its members disappeared from public consciousness almost instantly, so Pearce has been chasing fame since, culminating in the final humiliation of ejection from the X-Factor at the Weeping stage in 2009.

So here is a man who has actually won one of these shows, lived through the experience of it singularly failing to make him an international star, and yet is still sufficiently deluded and desperate that he believes the X-Factor represents his sole shot at happiness and fulfilment. Rather than let him back on telly, they should have set him up with a desk job and a shrink; these are seriously fragile people that ITV is torturing for our weekend entertainment.

Poetry is rubbish

Every quarter the Poetry Society sends me its Review magazine, showcasing the work of the nation’s top contemporary poets, and every quarter I go through it and think “crap, crap, crap, rubbish, rubbish, crap, rubbish, crap.” I suppose I ought to cancel the subscription, really.

In his notorious trashing of luvviedom and the accepted wisdom that theatre is something “the British do best”, the Yard wrote: “No, the British do poetry best, they merely do theatre a lot.”

He got that wrong. The British do pop music best, their poetry is almost entirely crap.

I don’t just refer to Sturgeon’s Law, whereby 90% of everything is crap, though that certainly applies; I mean that the whole game is rotten. Let’s get the handful of exceptions out the way: at the microscopic peak of the pyramid are Heaney, Hill, Ellis etc, (though even there one sometimes feels like saying “Oooh, la-dee-da, yes we’re all going to die and life is hard and we’ve lost touch with nature and history. Get over it, soft lad!”) and playing a slightly different game are the likes of Armitage and Cope who rescue the thing with humour or accessibility or satirical bite.

But between the peak of the pyramid and the vast base consisting of amateur scribblers and compulsive rhyme jockeys, are the professionals: the competition winners and collection-publishers. In other words, the British poetry ‘Scene’. And the Scene is crap.

The source of its crappiness is the stifling uniformity of tone. Prissily self-conscious, breathily earnest, knowingly wondering. Designed to be uttered in a halting semi-whisper by Juliet Stevenson to an audience of the kind of headscarf-wearers who laugh unnaturally loudly at certain Shakespeare lines to prove they get it, and then to be discussed with gesticulation-heavy intensity by the middling Newsnight Review panellists.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at it some time. Except you probably haven’t and won’t because hardly anybody does. Alex Turner and Amy Winehouse don’t count as poets because they’re far too good for the Poetry Scene. The technical side has disappeared up its own esoteric half-eye-rhyming posterior, so like modern opera it is an Unpopular Art, which makes it an impotent art, a failure. Topics are relentlessly re-peddled (language, losing touch with nature, middle-class angst).

Supply so far exceeds public demand for this stuff that the poets write not for the pleasure of the reader nor even, I imagine, for themselves but for the Scene, for the editors and judges. The consequence of this is a crippling self-awareness: look, I edited this poem until it was just obscure enough, see what I left unsaid! Observe my carefully-crafted last line: doesn’t it leave just the right amount

hanging?