6 Things I Saw Since My Website Broke
No, honestly, it did. Somehow I couldn't access the bugger any more. Anyway, the good people at my hosting company sorted out, once I had the bright idea of telling them about it. Anyway; we're back in business, so here's a catch-up type article, incorporating all the articles I was going to write, but couldn't.
1. Jade Goody, Everywhere
Which has, obviously, been incredibly dull. I find it borderline impossible to write Jade Goody's name without putting the word "Gumdrops" after her surname, or "Fucking" before it. I loathed Jade Goody from the off. Early on, everyone slagged her off for being thick; then they slagged her off for being racist; then they slagged her off for pretending to have cancer, and I'll be the latter group feel a bit guilty now. None of those things, obviously, are true. The problem with Jade was simply that she was smug, bullying, ignorant, cliquish, cackling, self-absorbed, uncaring, joyless, manipulative and thoroughly awful in every way. This was why Shilpa Shetty got it in the neck - it was nothing to do with her being all foreign-like, that just happened to be the most convenient stick with which to beat her. But here's the thing; it's possible to be sorry for someone you thoroughly dislike, so stop moaning about how conflicted you all are.
Anyway, the greatest joy of the whole affair has been watching all the liberal-media-types getting very self-righteous about Goody's privacy, and then falling over themselves to admit they were wrong when they got all weepy at her wedding. The most annoying thing about her death is that it's caused loads of women to go for cervical smears, which means that she's actually done more for society than I have. The most amusing thing is the way that people start saying she's a good person and a caring mother because she secured her children future, which just makes you think of that Chris Rock routine of niggaz taking credit for stuff they're supposed to do... you know the one... "'Ah take care of mah kids', shit, you supposed to take care of your kids". And the most interesting thing about it is that Jade Goody succeeded in turning herself into a narrative, a woman more about meaning than flesh, a media creation in ever sense of the word.
And that's where my interest in the whole thing ends, 'cos I've never met her. Moving on.
2. Rugby
Rather wonderful, obviously. Rugby is ultimately a very simple, reductive game in which fat blokes run at each other. It gets entertaining when either a: the men in question work out that running around each other is a better option, or b: they run at each other like psychotic bulls, tearing their own flesh apart to gain a yard or two. Ireland v Wales was the latter, and it was magnificent.
Still, we've got to stop pretending to like sport in this country. It's uncharitable to point out that we're the European champions at a sport that almost no-one in the world plays, but we should clarify something - no-one in Ireland likes rugby, not really. How many people do you know who actually play it? Or, for that matter, go to watch Cork Con versus Young Munster, or Dolphin versus Garryowen (that's pretty much all the rugby teams I know, and I only remember Garryowen because it sounds like a member of Take That)? Any excuse to get pissed, of course, but we've got to be careful about this; remember, you don't have to like a sport, just 'cos someone Irish is good at it. It's bad enough that we have to pretend to like golf when Pádraig Harrington wins something, but it can get worse. You remember the bad old days of the 1980s, when the success of Seán Kelly, Stephen Roche, and That Other One With The Glasses meant watching mind-numbing hours of the Tour de France, don't you? Is that what you want? Is it????
The only alternative, of course, is to just start liking good sports again. But that means football, and watching Ireland play football hasn't been entertaining since 1990, when we hacked our way to the quarter finals of the World Cup without winning a game, and that was only because Éamon went mental after the Egypt game. Remember - we're the poxy team who denied the whole world the spectacle of watching Gheorge Hagi take on Franco Baresi. We owe everyone an apology.
3. Questions And Answers
They talked about rugby on Questions and Answers the other night. Someone asked what the nation could learn from the exploits of the rugby team, and people actually took the question seriously. There are so many succinct, correct ways of answering that question. "That alcohol is bad and evil, except when it's imbibed during or after an Irish sporting event." Or maybe, "That there's not much to be learned from a game of rugby, unless of course you're a rugby player." Or perhaps, "Fuck off."
Irish current affairs is pretty much impossible to watch these days, because everyone involved in it is so stupid. This week's Questions and Answers featured Róisín Shortall, who's almost as annoying as Nora Owen and Mary O'Rourke rolled into one. Yet the Labour Party keep letting her out, bleating like a syphilitic sheep but without the lucidity, growing bloated on the sound of her one-eyed yapping banalities, single-handedly ensuring that Fianna Fáil will probably get into power again. Róisín Shortall can only be a right-wing plant commissioned to bring the left-wing movement down from within, since she's the only Irish person more irritating than Bono. Oh how I loathe her.
The best bit was when a girl in the audience castigated striking workers on account of how she'd lost her job, said that we all had to stick together, and said that we should just make strikes illegal... and no-one actually disputed this. But this is the problem; the leaders on all sides are so fucking stupid, we can't really complain about random members of the public being stupid as well. Share the pain, guys.
People losing their jobs, people going to three-day weeks, people taking pay cuts - disgusting, regardless of sector... share the pain? Our government, the people who are supposed to be looking after the most vulnerable, are pulling the same shit and having the gall to call it a pensions level... share the pain? The civil service is stuffed full of government advisers, admin staff who do fuck all, arsebiscuits who contribute nothing and draw a big fat paycheck for doing it... share the pain? This is a government who's idea of controlling public spending is to set up yet another department to finance it, at Christ knows what cost (no, really - www.ndfa.ie - has to be seen to be believed)... that's right chaps. Share the pain.
Take the "Pension Levy", for example (it's not a Pension Levy, it's a pay cut, but what the hell). The issue isn't that it's wrong - it's that it's grotesquely unfair. Someone earning €36,000 will lose more money from their take home pay than someone earning €45,000. Someone on €38,000 will pay the same percentage as someone on €120,000. If you earn €26,500, you have to pay twice as much as someone earning €500 more. There's an income calculator here, it's worth looking at:
http://www.finance.gov.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/Publications/other/2009/calcillusfeb09.xls
Let's be fair; this isn't malicious, or deliberate. It's just a product of stupidity and general laziness; the actions of people who can't be bothered thinking about their decisions with rigour, of people who are approaching the finance issue the same way as people whose fire is going out and are burning whatever furniture happens to be nearest. The most accurate word for this is "carelessness", but we use the word "careless" too freely. Here, it's a very specific word. It means people who don't care; cronies who are in power so long, they think they're entitled to it; the sort of people who will complain about homeless organisations sending them too many emails. Weak, sad, ugly little men.
4. Dragon's Den
I hoped the Irish version would have Dragons in it. No such luck.
The opening of the Irish version of Dragon's Den is one of the most spectacularly badly-judged sequences for some time. Piles of money on tables; rich people playing polo on horses, driving impressive-looking cars, clay-pigeon shooting on their country estates. Maybe this was supposed to be aspirational, but you have to wonder why they didn't expect all the unemployed rabble to switch off with a plainitive cry of "oh, you smug cunts."
Annoyingly, the rest of Dragon's Den is pretty competent, and actually rather compelling. The Dragons themselves are made up of all the people who are supposed to be there; there's the Baldy Lad Who Really Fancies Himself, the Down-To-Earth Dub who never invests in anything, the Slightly Effeminate One, the One With The Combover, and The Woman Who's Very Stylish And Yet Frighteningly Unattractive. They're quite an articulate bunch though, and they're mad enough to invest in a handbag with a light on it. The weird thing is the fantastic disconnect between the ideas (some of which are quite good) and the depths-of-Roscommon accents on display. This isn't a programme, it's a culchie menagerie. And it's thoroughly, magnificently entertaining.
5. Skins
There was a time when Skins was a simple teen-drama programme. It introduced a bunch of teenage characters and followed them around for a couple of years, then they all buggered off and the worst actor of all them wound up being the best, i.e. that bloke from Slumdog Millionaire. And then, suddenly, Skins had a whole new cast, and has now become something more than a drama programme.
This year, the programme has positively revelled in the glee of introducing new people. As with the first two series, the characters can all be best summed up in a sentence - and in the first episode this actually happens, with all of them giving their principle character motivation to Ardal O'Hanlon (doing a gorgeously funny turn as an unwilling teacher). And then, they progress along more or less exactly the same lines that you might expect. The autistic one becomes more comfortable with himself socially, the boy and girl who fancy each other get together, the three best mates fight and fragment then get back together, the lesbian girl outs herself, the other lesbian girl gets togethret with her... you get the picture.
Some of the individual episodes of Skins this year have been outstanding, and it's been more consistently watchable than Series 2 (which had a terrible run of early episodes). It's also rather more edgy than previously - whereas the Series 1/2 characters were all basically a decent bunch, this crowd have some characters who simply aren't particularly nice at all (not least Effy, who's supposed to be enigmatic and tortured, but actually is just plain irritating). That isn't to say thatthey aren't interesting, and Cook might well be the best character Skins has given us yet. JJ's individual episode is also, in its own way, rather wonderful. And yet there's a predictability about the programme now, a sense of terrible deja vu about the nightclub scenes or teenagers getting fucked up. These characters meet at the start of the show, and don't really have the same sense of history or togetherness as the first bunch - in fact the show effectively has two finales, with the group splitting up to achieve this. This isn't a programme, it's a place, a conveyor-belt of young actors where everything is increasingly familiar.
But hey - teenagers need a place to go, right? It's still funny, and the writing is becoming increasingly assured. It's difficult to see where these characters can go from here, but they'll probably find somewhere. After all, this is Bristol.
6. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
A-ha, here it is. Stewart Lee; a comedian with carefully-honed material, utter confidence in his own eloquence, the sort of comedian who will do a five-minute build up to a punchline with absolute confidence that his audience will let him. Take some time out to watch Michael McIntyre, or Russell Howard, and then two minutes of this bloke; this is a guy who takes his craft seriously.
He's also funny. His opinion on My Booky-Wook by Russell Brand; "You can read Russell Brand's autobiography and dismiss it as rubbish, if you like; or you can dismiss it as rubbish without reading it, if you prefer." Lee is angry, like most good comedians are. What sets him apart from the bunch is his utter lucidity; this isn't a scattergun "play from your fucking heart" Bill Hicks inspired routine, it's a man who will say of Chris Moyles' book - very, very quietly and thoughtfully - "You would not wish this on the red arse of your worst enemy."
Disillusionment's always a tricky thing to get right without coming across as a bitter old man. Which is why the best thing about the show isn't Lee's care, or his unapologetically highbrow concerns, or the way his sudden spurts of vulgarity are all the more devastating for their unexpectedness - no, the best thing about this show is the title sequence. A forty year old man driving a thoroughly absurd flower-power car through the fields, followed by a circus act for no apparent reason, looking quite blissfully happy. You might ask, when Stewart Lee tears apart just about everything in contemporary culture, and here it is; unabashed revelling in silliness, gleeful revelling in a ridiculous aesthetic, culture that tries to be fun and interesting rather than trying to be cool and inscrutable. The best thing I've seen on television, for ages; a silly car driving through a field. Who'd have thought?
1. Jade Goody, Everywhere
Which has, obviously, been incredibly dull. I find it borderline impossible to write Jade Goody's name without putting the word "Gumdrops" after her surname, or "Fucking" before it. I loathed Jade Goody from the off. Early on, everyone slagged her off for being thick; then they slagged her off for being racist; then they slagged her off for pretending to have cancer, and I'll be the latter group feel a bit guilty now. None of those things, obviously, are true. The problem with Jade was simply that she was smug, bullying, ignorant, cliquish, cackling, self-absorbed, uncaring, joyless, manipulative and thoroughly awful in every way. This was why Shilpa Shetty got it in the neck - it was nothing to do with her being all foreign-like, that just happened to be the most convenient stick with which to beat her. But here's the thing; it's possible to be sorry for someone you thoroughly dislike, so stop moaning about how conflicted you all are.
Anyway, the greatest joy of the whole affair has been watching all the liberal-media-types getting very self-righteous about Goody's privacy, and then falling over themselves to admit they were wrong when they got all weepy at her wedding. The most annoying thing about her death is that it's caused loads of women to go for cervical smears, which means that she's actually done more for society than I have. The most amusing thing is the way that people start saying she's a good person and a caring mother because she secured her children future, which just makes you think of that Chris Rock routine of niggaz taking credit for stuff they're supposed to do... you know the one... "'Ah take care of mah kids', shit, you supposed to take care of your kids". And the most interesting thing about it is that Jade Goody succeeded in turning herself into a narrative, a woman more about meaning than flesh, a media creation in ever sense of the word.
And that's where my interest in the whole thing ends, 'cos I've never met her. Moving on.
2. Rugby
Rather wonderful, obviously. Rugby is ultimately a very simple, reductive game in which fat blokes run at each other. It gets entertaining when either a: the men in question work out that running around each other is a better option, or b: they run at each other like psychotic bulls, tearing their own flesh apart to gain a yard or two. Ireland v Wales was the latter, and it was magnificent.
Still, we've got to stop pretending to like sport in this country. It's uncharitable to point out that we're the European champions at a sport that almost no-one in the world plays, but we should clarify something - no-one in Ireland likes rugby, not really. How many people do you know who actually play it? Or, for that matter, go to watch Cork Con versus Young Munster, or Dolphin versus Garryowen (that's pretty much all the rugby teams I know, and I only remember Garryowen because it sounds like a member of Take That)? Any excuse to get pissed, of course, but we've got to be careful about this; remember, you don't have to like a sport, just 'cos someone Irish is good at it. It's bad enough that we have to pretend to like golf when Pádraig Harrington wins something, but it can get worse. You remember the bad old days of the 1980s, when the success of Seán Kelly, Stephen Roche, and That Other One With The Glasses meant watching mind-numbing hours of the Tour de France, don't you? Is that what you want? Is it????
The only alternative, of course, is to just start liking good sports again. But that means football, and watching Ireland play football hasn't been entertaining since 1990, when we hacked our way to the quarter finals of the World Cup without winning a game, and that was only because Éamon went mental after the Egypt game. Remember - we're the poxy team who denied the whole world the spectacle of watching Gheorge Hagi take on Franco Baresi. We owe everyone an apology.
3. Questions And Answers
They talked about rugby on Questions and Answers the other night. Someone asked what the nation could learn from the exploits of the rugby team, and people actually took the question seriously. There are so many succinct, correct ways of answering that question. "That alcohol is bad and evil, except when it's imbibed during or after an Irish sporting event." Or maybe, "That there's not much to be learned from a game of rugby, unless of course you're a rugby player." Or perhaps, "Fuck off."
Irish current affairs is pretty much impossible to watch these days, because everyone involved in it is so stupid. This week's Questions and Answers featured Róisín Shortall, who's almost as annoying as Nora Owen and Mary O'Rourke rolled into one. Yet the Labour Party keep letting her out, bleating like a syphilitic sheep but without the lucidity, growing bloated on the sound of her one-eyed yapping banalities, single-handedly ensuring that Fianna Fáil will probably get into power again. Róisín Shortall can only be a right-wing plant commissioned to bring the left-wing movement down from within, since she's the only Irish person more irritating than Bono. Oh how I loathe her.
The best bit was when a girl in the audience castigated striking workers on account of how she'd lost her job, said that we all had to stick together, and said that we should just make strikes illegal... and no-one actually disputed this. But this is the problem; the leaders on all sides are so fucking stupid, we can't really complain about random members of the public being stupid as well. Share the pain, guys.
People losing their jobs, people going to three-day weeks, people taking pay cuts - disgusting, regardless of sector... share the pain? Our government, the people who are supposed to be looking after the most vulnerable, are pulling the same shit and having the gall to call it a pensions level... share the pain? The civil service is stuffed full of government advisers, admin staff who do fuck all, arsebiscuits who contribute nothing and draw a big fat paycheck for doing it... share the pain? This is a government who's idea of controlling public spending is to set up yet another department to finance it, at Christ knows what cost (no, really - www.ndfa.ie - has to be seen to be believed)... that's right chaps. Share the pain.
Take the "Pension Levy", for example (it's not a Pension Levy, it's a pay cut, but what the hell). The issue isn't that it's wrong - it's that it's grotesquely unfair. Someone earning €36,000 will lose more money from their take home pay than someone earning €45,000. Someone on €38,000 will pay the same percentage as someone on €120,000. If you earn €26,500, you have to pay twice as much as someone earning €500 more. There's an income calculator here, it's worth looking at:
http://www.finance.gov.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/Publications/other/2009/calcillusfeb09.xls
Let's be fair; this isn't malicious, or deliberate. It's just a product of stupidity and general laziness; the actions of people who can't be bothered thinking about their decisions with rigour, of people who are approaching the finance issue the same way as people whose fire is going out and are burning whatever furniture happens to be nearest. The most accurate word for this is "carelessness", but we use the word "careless" too freely. Here, it's a very specific word. It means people who don't care; cronies who are in power so long, they think they're entitled to it; the sort of people who will complain about homeless organisations sending them too many emails. Weak, sad, ugly little men.
4. Dragon's Den
I hoped the Irish version would have Dragons in it. No such luck.
The opening of the Irish version of Dragon's Den is one of the most spectacularly badly-judged sequences for some time. Piles of money on tables; rich people playing polo on horses, driving impressive-looking cars, clay-pigeon shooting on their country estates. Maybe this was supposed to be aspirational, but you have to wonder why they didn't expect all the unemployed rabble to switch off with a plainitive cry of "oh, you smug cunts."
Annoyingly, the rest of Dragon's Den is pretty competent, and actually rather compelling. The Dragons themselves are made up of all the people who are supposed to be there; there's the Baldy Lad Who Really Fancies Himself, the Down-To-Earth Dub who never invests in anything, the Slightly Effeminate One, the One With The Combover, and The Woman Who's Very Stylish And Yet Frighteningly Unattractive. They're quite an articulate bunch though, and they're mad enough to invest in a handbag with a light on it. The weird thing is the fantastic disconnect between the ideas (some of which are quite good) and the depths-of-Roscommon accents on display. This isn't a programme, it's a culchie menagerie. And it's thoroughly, magnificently entertaining.
5. Skins
There was a time when Skins was a simple teen-drama programme. It introduced a bunch of teenage characters and followed them around for a couple of years, then they all buggered off and the worst actor of all them wound up being the best, i.e. that bloke from Slumdog Millionaire. And then, suddenly, Skins had a whole new cast, and has now become something more than a drama programme.
This year, the programme has positively revelled in the glee of introducing new people. As with the first two series, the characters can all be best summed up in a sentence - and in the first episode this actually happens, with all of them giving their principle character motivation to Ardal O'Hanlon (doing a gorgeously funny turn as an unwilling teacher). And then, they progress along more or less exactly the same lines that you might expect. The autistic one becomes more comfortable with himself socially, the boy and girl who fancy each other get together, the three best mates fight and fragment then get back together, the lesbian girl outs herself, the other lesbian girl gets togethret with her... you get the picture.
Some of the individual episodes of Skins this year have been outstanding, and it's been more consistently watchable than Series 2 (which had a terrible run of early episodes). It's also rather more edgy than previously - whereas the Series 1/2 characters were all basically a decent bunch, this crowd have some characters who simply aren't particularly nice at all (not least Effy, who's supposed to be enigmatic and tortured, but actually is just plain irritating). That isn't to say thatthey aren't interesting, and Cook might well be the best character Skins has given us yet. JJ's individual episode is also, in its own way, rather wonderful. And yet there's a predictability about the programme now, a sense of terrible deja vu about the nightclub scenes or teenagers getting fucked up. These characters meet at the start of the show, and don't really have the same sense of history or togetherness as the first bunch - in fact the show effectively has two finales, with the group splitting up to achieve this. This isn't a programme, it's a place, a conveyor-belt of young actors where everything is increasingly familiar.
But hey - teenagers need a place to go, right? It's still funny, and the writing is becoming increasingly assured. It's difficult to see where these characters can go from here, but they'll probably find somewhere. After all, this is Bristol.
6. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
A-ha, here it is. Stewart Lee; a comedian with carefully-honed material, utter confidence in his own eloquence, the sort of comedian who will do a five-minute build up to a punchline with absolute confidence that his audience will let him. Take some time out to watch Michael McIntyre, or Russell Howard, and then two minutes of this bloke; this is a guy who takes his craft seriously.
He's also funny. His opinion on My Booky-Wook by Russell Brand; "You can read Russell Brand's autobiography and dismiss it as rubbish, if you like; or you can dismiss it as rubbish without reading it, if you prefer." Lee is angry, like most good comedians are. What sets him apart from the bunch is his utter lucidity; this isn't a scattergun "play from your fucking heart" Bill Hicks inspired routine, it's a man who will say of Chris Moyles' book - very, very quietly and thoughtfully - "You would not wish this on the red arse of your worst enemy."
Disillusionment's always a tricky thing to get right without coming across as a bitter old man. Which is why the best thing about the show isn't Lee's care, or his unapologetically highbrow concerns, or the way his sudden spurts of vulgarity are all the more devastating for their unexpectedness - no, the best thing about this show is the title sequence. A forty year old man driving a thoroughly absurd flower-power car through the fields, followed by a circus act for no apparent reason, looking quite blissfully happy. You might ask, when Stewart Lee tears apart just about everything in contemporary culture, and here it is; unabashed revelling in silliness, gleeful revelling in a ridiculous aesthetic, culture that tries to be fun and interesting rather than trying to be cool and inscrutable. The best thing I've seen on television, for ages; a silly car driving through a field. Who'd have thought?
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
20:05
1 Comments:
Hmmmm....the dog ate my website...right so.
I youtubed Stewart Lee yesterday - in fact, all day yesterday - and he is, as you say , profoundly good. The funniest I found was a routine from a very funny show in Glasgow where he winds up his audience to the point where you feel he's teetering on the edge of a kicking - but maybe he gets away with it cos he's turned up the heat in little increments. I remember glasgow after the summer of braveheart, and though it wasn't as mental or nationalist as, say, Stirling it was awash with William Wallace mania. Then this guy says this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4-S8n8-9RU
and part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgm3xMWQVT0
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