The Weekly Hat – Number Eighteen
Hello there.
This week’s Weekly Hat… started off as a fairly banal ramble about politics and ended up as a lengthy two-part ramble about British society through the lovely filter of The Sun newspaper. It’s nowhere near as pretentious as it sounds, honest.
Meanwhile, I went to Thorpe Park yesterday with my sister, and experienced various rides including the Saw movie-based ride. Never seen a Saw movie in my life, but the ride was quite fun. Perhaps even scary at times. Also went on Nemesis: Inferno, the spin-off ride, Stealth and various others. As ever, the best time to go on big theme park rides is the end of the day, when queues due down slightly and staff start shoving people through quicker to try and go home on time.
See, useful advice already. Now, the hat-content…
- An election year in the UK – “No we can’t!”: The Labour conference happens. But why think about that when we can think about newspapers?
- “Let’s fuck ‘em up!”: It seems the main reason not to commit horrific crime is to avoid newspapers organising lynch mobs…
- Media and stuff: FlashForward! Gameswipe! Even more!
- Behatted Photo Of The Week: Featuring an individual so mysterious, I myself don’t yet know who it will be.
An Election Year in the UK – “No, we can’t!”
With a heavy heart, I accept that I’ll probably have to write about British politics again this week. It was the Labour conference, the Conservatives said some stuff and the Sun waded in to provide me with a few easy jokes. In short, for the first time in a while, something actually happened other than dull men sniping at each other. (Although that venerable tradition continues as well, don’t worry.)
Anyway, on the off-chance you are not of our fair isle, here’s a short, heavily biased, summary of what’s been going on: Gordon Brown and the Labour Party remain just about in government, and have held their conference to try and persuade their people and the public at large that they have a chance of winning the general election that will take place some time in the next nine months or so.
Prior to the conference, most people believed Brown had about as much chance of retaining power as I do of obtaining it. It appeared to be the general consensus that David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives, will be our next Prime Minister as long as he can manage to survive until the election without getting hit by a bus or molesting any infants. This fact wasn’t to my liking, as David Cameron seems to be incapable of opening his mouth without irritating me.
Post-conference, has there been any kind of change or difference? Weeeell… Not really. The BBC report I watched the other night commented that it was impressive there was no overt inter-party fighting or unpleasantness, and the PM’s speech was generally perceived as acceptable. However, his wife’s was apparently better, which is always emasculating, and nothing staggering was announced. But, if one is a massive pessimist and counts victory as a failure to self-destruct, then this was a win! Hooray!
Except for one tiny point.
In a completely uncoincidental attempt to undermine Labour mid-conference, The Sun newspaper chose this week to announce publicly that they were switching their “allegiance” to the Conservatives. Some saw this as a major announcement, although I didn’t realise they were meant to be backing Labour beforehand, as I hadn’t seen them print anything remotely positive about the ruling party for months.
Nonetheless, I am in a minority, it seems. And, depressingly, The Sun has predicted the winner of the last few elections successfully. They’ve also tried to claim “it was The Sun wot won it” on a few occasions, with varying degrees of truth. Sometimes, they do seem to have a real influences, swaying their annoyingly vast readership into going their way. Other times, like this one, they just “predict” in the direction that the whole country is obviously leaning anyway, then try and claim the credit afterwards.
More to the point, The Sun announced this in a manner that, as ever, took the “news” right out of “newspaper”. The Sun, although never quite as much of a right wing instruction manual as the Daily Mail, has never tried to offer up even the illusion of objectivity. A typical Sun front page involves one of the following things:
- Tedious ocean-dredging celebrity scandal.
- Attempts to incite rage in its readerbase by waving someone of dubious moral character (usually a paedophile) in front of them and shouting “KILL”.
- Political stories which can be beaten down to one point and used for a pun or cartoon.
- Really fractional advances in some story that has received tedious blanket coverage. (See: Madeleine McCann, Diana)
There are probably some others, but that was about it. So, when they announced with a scream that they were “backing” the Tories, they were very keen that it be seen as news. And, sadly, it was. Because the Sun has the biggest circulation of any newspaper in the UK, and because the Rupert Murdoch empire made it so.
And then they ran cheap, obvious stories taking potshots at Labour for the rest of the week. And we all lived hatefully ever after. Good week in news, everybody! Let’s all take five and come back here in a minute, for some more about the inevitable, horrible downfall of British society into a pit of witch-hunting and xenophobia!
“Let’s fuck ‘em up!”
Look, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Now that we’ve done politics, let’s talk about a subject which has a lot in common with it – paedophilia. (Well, they share a first letter and several main characters, at any rate.)
To be precise, the oh-so-exciting revelation that some people met on Facebook and began abusing some children to impress each other. Now, just to be clear, since I’ll probably be making jokes again shortly, this is clearly very not good, and if you consider doing this yourself, I urge you not to. Quite aside from the moral wrongness of it, you might find yourself starring in an ethically sound news story such as this one.
Yes, The Sun again, doing what they do best: Waving a genuinely horrible crime in front of its readership so they can cheer, boo and form lynch mobs accordingly. Skirting along the edges of libel and contempt of court with practised ease (plus the knowledge that no-one will ever prosecute, and the Murdoch Money can easily out-lawyer them if they do), they wade in.
Count, if you will, the entirely unobjective terms of judgment. In just the first few paragraphs, “vile crimes” and “evil”. Did you ever think you’d see the term “paedo triangle” in a serious news story? Well, now you have.
Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough to make you angry, they’ve thrown in two separate references to how the parents of children who went to the affected nursery “wept” in court when they heard the charges. (They don’t yet know which children were actually abused, so they just wept as one.) Parents weeping is an easy emotional call-out, because it helps you imagine the sad scenes in films.
Oh, I also found this one. It features a bit of choice judgmental language (and why do tabloids love the word “vile” so much?), but mostly, it’s just a catalogue of sexual offences for people to read and get excited about. After the first paragraph, there’s one (and only one) word in the story which has been picked out for special emphasis. Go see for yourself.
This is just becoming an extension of the entertainment industry, isn’t it? They’re trying to turn this into the most simplistic narrative possible, so people can boo the nasty evil villains. “My god, he’s so mean, he even raped his pet TURTLE.” It’s a wonder I’m even surprised anymore.
The worst part is, these people really are quite low-ranking specimens of humanity. The word “vile” might not be entirely inapplicable. And yet, out of them and the tabloid press, it’s the latter I hate more. Because they’ve got a ridiculous amount of people’s attention, and they use it to boil complex issues down to pantomime level, turning the subjects of its stories into cardboard cutout templates and making us all that little bit simpler and shallower just by existing.
Sorry, there really weren’t many jokes in there.
Media and stuff
- The new US series FlashForward hit British TV with pleasant efficiency this week, airing on Five a mere few days after its showing on ABC over there. But was it any good? Umm. It certainly seems untroubled by brilliance, but there’s enough interesting strands there to keep me coming back. It pivots around the concept that the entire planet blacks out for two minutes and has a vision of their lives at a specific point, six months into the future. But I was almost more intrigued by the notion that this two-minute mass black out has caused a massive death toll and the planet to go into a semi-dystopian state. Nevertheless, both central notions intrigue me enough to keep me coming back, even if some of the characters are a shade bland. (So, yes, that’ll be the root of the Lost comparison everyone keeps making.) And it has Steve from Coupling in it, which is no bad thing. You can watch the show on Five’s website if this review has excited you.
- This week also saw Charlie Brooker expand his burgeoning “-wipe” franchise to video gaming with a one off special: Gameswipe. It’s available here on iPlayer, but go quickly, as it’s only there for a couple more days. This was very much pitched at the non-gamer, with brief intros to each type of game, choice pundit commentary and a volley of abuse at a few rubbish games. For those in the non-gaming bracket (such as myself), it was fun viewing, although I’d quite happily listen to Brooker ramble about almost anything, so disregard this review if you wish. Sadly, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame wasn’t able to contribute, despite having named Brooker as an inspiration in the past, but the show did introduce me to singing reviewer Rebecca Mayes, which let me spend an entertaining ten minutes watching her work at that hyperlink back there.
- A trailer appeared for a new Nightmare On Elm Street movie. (A remake, predictably. Because making “Part XVII” of these series is now out of fashion.) Now, I never watched a single one of these movies, because they all seem to follow the same dull formula of “stupid teenager characters mostly die out of stupidity”, but I find it oddly compelling how they create these monsters and string them out. And now they can try and treat Freddy Krueger like he’s new and scary again, even though we all basically know what he looks like, because he’s got a new actor and a slight redesign. (As has been widely reported, Freddy now looks more like a real burn victim, rather than someone who has slowly picked his skin off. Or at least, he’s meant to, you don’t actually see that much in the trailer.) It’s an interesting phenomena, although Hollywood sceptics would probably gripe that it’s another example of recycling the past being used in place of new ideas and creativity. And they’d probably have a point, but at least it’s interesting for me.
- Finally, Toy Story has been re-released in “Disney Digital 3D”. I saw it last night, as I needed something to do, and it was… well, two sides to this point. Firstly, yes, Toy Story is still brilliant. Never anything wrong with seeing that again. On the other hand, I must admit the 3D doesn’t add an awful lot. If you have the DVD and a pretty big television, you could probably get away with staying in rather than paying premium 3D cinema prices.
Behatted Photo Of The Week
In the time since I started pasting up the material, I’ve decided that this week’s Behatted hero shalt be… Charlie Brooker (human), columnist, humourist and man of many -wipes. His co-star, our universally-beloved main character Len (hat). Yah.
Fine Printy Squint: Photo yoinked from damo1977 on Flickr and it be used under a Creative Commons Licence.
October 4th, 2009 at 11:16 am
[...] here to review the rest: The Weekly Hat – Number Eighteen Tags: yesterday-with, including-the, various-rides, thorpe, including-the-saw, sister, thorpe-park, [...]
October 4th, 2009 at 11:58 am
[...] the original post: The Weekly Hat – Number Eighteen Posted in Celebrity News | Tags: announced-with, seen-as-news, tories, [...]