The Weekly Hat – Number Twenty-Nine
Good evening. And, indeed, happy Christmas!
Yes, this be the last Weekly Hat before turkey day on Friday. I am viewing next week’s as the big Christmas Special, as that will go out the day after Boxing Day and feature such festive things as the Christmas Doctor Who episode and, um, something else. But today is the last one before it, so have a good day.
It’s also a bit later than usual, partly because I didn’t start it until eleven this morning and partly because I wanted to wait for the result of the Rage/McElderry chart showdown. As luck would have it, said results leaked at about half three, so I’ve done all the writing by half four and, presuming the leaks are correct, will just click publish shortly after they announce the number one at seven.
That’s probably enough preamble. Contents!
- How About This Weather?: This week, two big stories have hit involving weather. So I have combined them.
- Media And Stuff Special – Raging Against The X Factor: Decided this had become big enough to expand from the Media bit.
- Media And Stuff: Plus I had enough other random guff to fill this bit without it. Merlin! Doctor Who! Get a free book!
- Behatted Photo Of The Week: Someone whose TV show has just finished. (For now.)
How About This Weather?
Under the above heading, I thought I would neatly subsume two of the stories that have been getting play this week. As they are both loosely linked by the involvement of… yes, the weather. See what I did there?
Anyway, the Copenhagen summit, which I utterly failed to write about last week, has come to a conclusion almost as impressive as my coverage of it. Basically, it appears that no-one got anything they wanted, there was an utter failure to agree on anything and the Americans swanned in and tried to take over.
Bad feeling has thus emerged over this, with hilarious puns like “No Hopenhagen” and “Crapenhagen” propagating across the internet faster than they have any right to, considering they contain little or no actual humour. There is particular shock because I think people were expecting better from Mr Barack Obama, the Messiah-turned-President. If he doesn’t start pulling off a few miracles soon, his chances of re-election may drop screaming into the toilet.
Because although I don’t think he’s exactly done a bad job, he hasn’t exactly delivered much improvement for someone who was elected on a platform of change, change and more change. Perhaps if he’d been a generic Democrat, he’d have gotten away with that, but by promising such exciting new things, he has left himself with the need to provide something other than the same as before, only with less outright prickishness.
But anyway, Obama aside, there’s a general sense of disappointment floating around the world leaders were unable to deliver on the feeling of genuine hope and optimism they had, for once, managed to generate. I mean, seriously, all they’d have needed to do was wander in there, agree on a few things, lay down a few solid figures, and people would have loved it.
But no. If my limited understanding of the politics is correct, they haven’t even really signed an agreement, just promised to “take heed” of the accord. Bad form, folks. The hacks will have you for dinner over this. Well, except the ones who think climate change is a complete fiction. They might give you a big hug.
Meanwhile, whilst our leaders utterly failed to solve one of the biggest global problems of our times, those of us who live in the UK were distracted by… the sight of some snow! Even though we normally get it at least once or twice a year, this has become a source of girlish entertainment to many, and grumpy frustration to others. Nonetheless, it preoccupies the hell out of us.
There was, admittedly, some bitterness this time round, as the latest round of snow failed to reach the dizzy heights of February’s Snow Day, which successfully got thousands of people across work for the day. Well, that certainly didn’t happen in London this week, as public transport doggedly kept functioning whilst thousands of workers willed it desperately to fail.
But the pill was softened (for me) by the fact that I’m now off work for two festive weeks anyway.
Anyway, the snow was not too bad in the end, and by now it’s more or less gone. I gather it was worse elsewhere in the country, but let’s be honest, only what happens in London matters.
And it was all a big distraction from what’s really important anyway. See earlier in the piece for what I mean by that.
Media And Stuff Special – Raging Against The X Factor
As I write this, it is nearly four o’clock on the Sunday, so the chart results have not yet been released yet, but Twitter is buzzing with the news that Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’ has apparently pipped X Factor winner Joe McElderry at the post.
I’m not going to put this up until it’s official, simply to avoid the shame of being incorrect, but these Twitter rumours do have a good record. So, it looks like the public will has triumphed. Kinda.
This has been a bemusing weak, as people took sides with increasing vehemence either for or against the X Factor single. Many have picked holes in the choice of song to go against it, for reasons including (but not limited to) the following:
- It’s on the same label as McElderry, so the money goes into the same pockets.
- It’s not exactly very festive. (But neither is ‘The Climb’, so I don’t think X Factor wins on this one. Admittedly, they could’ve chosen something more Christmasesque to protest with.)
- It seems hypocritical to fight against Cowell taking away your free will by doing what someone else tells you instead.
- The noble tradition of Great Christmas Number Ones is a myth; it’s normally Bob The Builder or something like that.
And so on, and so forth. I can actually imagine that the first one is a non-issue simply because whoever came up with the idea thought it would be a good way of expressing rebellion. And I can see that it’s funny. After all, at least Killing In The Name is a good song.
Their victory does at least put paid to a ludicrous spell of presumed chart domination by the X Factor winner. To a large extent, this is a campaign aimed at Cowell and his machine rather than the winner himself, but I do think it wouldn’t have been possible if the winner had been a stronger personality.
After all, I’ve seen a lot of bitching that the Rage supporters are being childish, hypocritical, god knows what else, but not that many from anyone other than X Factor judges saying the kid deserves to win. Put even blunter, I don’t think this would have happened to Leona Lewis, simply because she does possess that “X-factor” they keep wittering about, whereas Joe McElderry is just… a nice-yet-somewhat-bland seeming kid who can sing reasonably well.
If this was a campaign against faintly dull artists singing rather dull covers (yeah, the choice of a recent Miley Cyrus song didn’t help) getting to number one because they were on a TV show, I can more or less support that, regardless of the time of year. So, well done Rage.
(Although, I will say, shame on you if you intentionally downloaded your song of choice more than once. Bad form.)
Media And Stuff
Yes, despite the massive media special above, there’s still more to come…
- The climax to the second series of Merlin aired last night on BBC1, which brought to an end a pretty decent run. Admittedly, I was hoping for more dramatic status quo changes in the finale, but in the end, the penultimate episode delivered a few of those, and I remain excited about Merlin’s return. There was a two-parter midway through involving a troll, which nearly killed my interest, being as it was heavily pitched at the children in the audience, but the remainder of the series kept up a good high standard. And, hopefully this isn’t too big a spoiler, the troll two-parter has very little effect on the other episodes so you could easily skip it. The full series of Merlin is available on iPlayer for a bit longer, with the last episode here.
- Inevitable Doctor Who coverage (but at least something actually aired on TV this time): The BBC’s comedy music quiz, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, ran a heavily Who-themed edition this week, hosted by David Tennant and featuring companions Catherine Tate and Bernard Cribbins as panellists. And it was… alright. I’ve praised a few episodes of Buzzcocks here throughout the run, and they were probably more entertaining. Weirdly, there may have been more here for Who fans than Buzzcocks ones. See it here, if that sounds like you.
- And yes, next week I will have an actual new episode of Doctor Who to type about. Also, I’ve been rewatching the third series on DVD to see John Simm’s Master again, in anticipation of his return in the Christmas episode. I hold firm in my belief that the third series contains the best episodes since Doctor Who came back, even if the fourth had a higher level of overall quality.
- A while back, I read ‘Bringing Nothing To The Party’ by Paul Carr. The book chronicles a period in Carr’s life when he tired of his job as a tech journalist, watching others become millionaires on the internet, and decided to try and launch a web-business of his own. Hillarity and heartbreak ensues. Anyway, it’s a very good, honest book and he’s giving it away for free online, without even requesting you sign up to his mailing list in return. Get it here. If you don’t give a toss about the world wide wub and its synonyms, you may not care, but if you do have any interest in the crazy old internet, it’s a fresh perspective and worth a go.
- And finally, a self-serving mention: I have made some Spotify playlists this week. I found myself unable to get through a whole album, so decided to just line up the songs I actually liked and listen to them again and again. I’m not going to start a website for distributing these, as I don’t think I’m especially good at it, but those of you with Spotify can click on the following links to enjoy my Mid-December playlist and my Holiday-Starting playlist. I have attempted to minimise the amount of Pogues tracks.
Behatted Photo Of The Week
This week, we feature Prince Arthur himself, aka Bradley James (human), accompanied by The Captain (hat). In case you hadn’t guessed, this refers to the recent climax of the second series of Merlin. Exciting news, yes, indeed…
Small Print: This original photo taken from Claire-Elizabeth on Flickr, and is covered under this Creative Commons Licence.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Thanks for the Bringing Nothing to the Party recommendation and link … have duely downloaded. (And what an awesome posts that goes with it. I wait eagerly for the day when I can pirate my own work online…
)
December 21st, 2009 at 10:40 am
Yeah, he’s a cool guy. Comes in very handy for stealing Weekly Hat material, also. Hope you enjoy.