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~ rants & reflections of Martin Jameson, writer, director & grizzled media gunslinger.

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Category Archives: Writing

Writing about writing

Holy Spider – Voyeurism or Bearing Witness?

25 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by Martin Jameson in Criticism, Film, Film Criticism, Media, New Releases, Sexual Politics, Television Criticism, Television Drama, Writing

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Ali Abbasi, Holy Spider, Saeed Hanaei, Wendy Ide

NB. There’s no way of talking about this without spoilers, although the film largely based on a true story, so it’s up to you.


Holy Spider is a tough watch. It’s a fictionalised account of the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, who murdered 16 women in Iran, all or most of whom were sex workers, in 2000-2001. He was ultimately caught and executed, but along the way, Hanaei became a folk hero of the religious right because of his claim that his killing spree was a divinely inspired mission to cleanse the streets of ‘corrupt women’.

Zar Amir Ebrahimi as Arezoo Rahimi in pursuit of the Holy Spider serial killer

In light of today’s protests by women in Iran against the strictures of the ‘Morality Police’ the story feels important and prophetic, suggesting that Hanaei’s twisted mentality is now enshrined in a state sanctioned murderously misogynistic DNA.

I should start by saying that I think Holy Spider is a very good film in many ways. It’s brilliantly made, utterly gripping, with superb acting all round. The director, Ali Abbasi, is himself Iranian (although he lives in Denmark now) and some might remember him from the very bizarre Border which came out a few years ago about a Troll working as a customs officer.

If you haven’t seen Border, dig it out. It’s VERY weird, completely original and utterly compelling.

But… But…. 

On the one hand Holy Spider follows an incredibly determined brave woman journalist, Arezoo Rahimi, who finally entraps Hanaei by posing as a sex worker and pursuing justice on behalf of his victims, on the other it endeavours to explore Hanaei’s psyche (embittered war veteran, religious zealot etc), following him as he commits murder after murder, which he gets away with because, as with Peter Sutcliffe, there is little sympathy for his sex worker victims who are seen as largely responsible for their own fate.

Hanaei is brilliantly and believably portrayed by Mehdi Majestani but is that part of the problem?

Here lies the problem. To tell this part of the story, Abbasi decides we need to watch not one, not two, but three very brutal murders, dwelling in graphic detail on highly disturbing images of their strangulation. While there is some attempt, certainly with two of the victims, to give them a hinterland and depth beyond being simply cinematic murder-fodder, there is clearly justification for the accusation that Abbasi is being unnecessarily voyeuristic. Wendy Ide in The Observer was particularly scathing, suggesting that this aspect of the film perpetuated precisely what it was attempting to critique and it was therefore only worthy of two stars. She has a point.

But… But…

I found myself very conflicted. In recent years, especially in the writing community, the consensus has been that we should aim to give far less narrative air time to perpetrators, and where possible make our stories about those who suffer at their hands. In 2021, in The Investigation, a brilliant Danish dramatisation around the murder of journalist Kim Wall in a wealthy entrepreneur’s private submarine, the perpetrator was neither named or featured at all. It was an incredibly affecting and powerful drama. 

Danish drama The Investigation resolutely denied the perpetrator airtime

The thing is, while I was blown away by the power of that Danish series, I can’t in all honesty bring myself to believe that this is the only way of respectfully telling these stories, after all sometimes it is our duty as writers to dig down into why people transgress in the way they do. In the case of Iran, where Abbasi is making a broader political point about ingrained cultural, political and religious misogyny, not to explore who Hanaei believes himself to be would be to render the whole enterprise utterly pointless.

Indeed, although Hanaei was caught after a potential victim managed to escape, the journalist’s brave, empowering entrapment story, gripping though it is, appears to be little more than worthy wish fulfilment. The truth of the film – and truth is what we’re about as writers and directors – lies in the parts of the film about which well-meaning, politically astute critics are so righteously critical.

So, could the film have been made without forcing us to watch those murders? Would one or two murders have been enough? The answer to that is yes, but I seriously doubt it would have been anywhere as powerful a statement as it is. It could reasonably – if uncomfortably – be argued that to do so would be less respectful of those victims, not more so, because in narrative terms the crimes would be sanitised for the audience, and Abbasi is addressing an audience who, he believes, simply do not take the issue of violence against women seriously. If there are people – sometimes controlling entire nations – who see violence against women as an abstract justified by a higher force, as divine retribution, then showing it as cold, brute, murderous evil done, repeatedly, by men (not gods), is thematically and politically justified. After all, that is the truth of the world.

When we meet the parents of one of the murdered women, torn apart by grief and shame, it is a hair-raising moment, precisely because we have lived the young woman’s terrible death with her. When Hanaei’s son coolly, proudly re-enacts his father’s crimes with his toddler sister, as if playing a children’s game, we flinch precisely because we have borne witness to the full horror of the deed as it happened.

And in a brilliant and shocking final act, the execution of Hanaei is seen to be equally brutal, the audience forced to watch in grim detail just as they have the murders of his female victims. We could equally ask do we really need to see that in all its horror? The answer for me is yes, because it exposes the suffocating pointlessness of any culture driven by retribution, divine or human.

In its brilliant conclusion, Holy Spider dramatises Hanaei passing his misogynist beliefs down to his son.

It has become easy to eschew voyeurism, and often there is good reason to be wearily impatient with tropes where women feature primarily as corpses, but equally there are times when those stories need to be told, and when perhaps those images need to be seen. 

Whether the balance is right here, and whether a woman director would have made this differently, or as effectively, or better, I genuinely have no idea. All I can say is that Holy Spider is an extremely powerful and disturbing film which I shall be thinking about for days if not weeks if not years, where a more discreet cinematic style might have been a good deal more forgettable.

It made me rightfully angry at the crime, not at the film maker, and I’ve never been one for blaming the messenger.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

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Enough of Top Ten Lists – The Reality of Panning for TV Gold.

04 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by Martin Jameson in Criticism, Television, Television Criticism, Television Drama, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Better Call Saul, Sandman, Telly, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The White Lotus, TV Commissioning, William Goldman

December ’twas the season to be jolly… and for critics to compile their top ten lists for the year just gone. But what do those lists tell us? It’s great to honour the best that the art of TV drama can offer, but do they really reflect the experience of the dedicated, or even average television viewer?

I’m a screenwriter, and I do a bit of reviewing, so I have a professional interest which perhaps leads me to watch more TV than most, but while we aim to learn from the best in our craft, what can we learn from the rest of it – the ‘quite good’; the ‘enjoyably disposable’; the downright dreary; and the ‘for-God’s-sake-someone, please-put-me-out-of-my-misery’. So it was, at the end of 2022, I thought I’d keep a note of everything I’d seen over the last twelve months. What will that tell me about where the art form is at the moment? Or, perhaps, the list will reveal more about me. Obviously, nobody can watch everything, but I realised not without a little shock, that I’d sat through over seventy TV series, albeit not all of them to the bitter end. As samples go that’s not too bad. I should also add that I saw sixty movies in the cinema.

What my mother warned me I’d become when I was a child…

What follows is a list… quite a long list, actually a set of lists and stats – I mean people, do it for sports, so why not take a leaf out of their book? – so please, just skim through – but that’s the point of the exercise, to see where the nuggets of gold lie in the context of all the grit and fish droppings at the bottom of the sieve. As I started to put the list together, the various categories started to define themselves. If you start losing the will to live… that’s the point too, but it would be great to compare notes.

Here we go!

The Premier League (Series I Bloody Loved): This is the most conventional list: twelve shows that really floated my remote, the ones that became the cornerstones of our week when their episodes dropped. I watch most of my TV with my wife, Gail, who does a proper job – stressful and completely knackering – i.e. she’s not a media luvvie, and so her intolerance for tedium or indulgence sets the bar pretty high! In ordering this list, I’m not thinking solely about quality, but rather about how much the show has stayed with me, and the visceral pleasure it inspired, or the soul-shaking sadness it evoked, which ultimately is the most important quality of all for a piece of story-telling. Did it make me say to myself, for whatever reason: ‘Yes! This is what watching television is about!’?

12. The Baby (HBO/Sky) – This horror comedy about a baby with murderous, supernatural powers disappeared under the radar, but it’s an intelligent show exploring the mucky emotional underbelly of modern parenthood (8 30 minute episodes).
11. 7 Lives of Lea (Netflix): A French YA supernatural drama in which a teenager discovers the remains of a dead body, and finds herself mysteriously living seven different lives, thirty years before, in a quest to unravel the truth of the boy’s murder. While some aspects are well trodden, it is ultimately a moving twist on familiar time-loop tropes (7 episodes – of course!).
10. Red Rose (BBC3): Witty and gripping, this YA tech chiller distinguished itself by being firmly rooted in the Bolton community where the action is set, and shows off a sparkling cast of new young talent (8 episodes).
9. The Dropout (Disney+): Perhaps over-shadowed by the flawless Dopesick in 2021, this 8 part dramatisation of the debacle that was Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos project, buckled under its own weight at times, but was gripping enough to stay in the memory and was held together by a striking central performance from Amanda Seyfried (8 episodes).
8. For All Mankind – Season 3 (Apple TV): The second season of the space-race counterfactual had embarrassingly jumped the shark, but moving on to Mars the show found its rocket boosters again, and was a compelling and convincing dramatic hypothetical (10 episodes).
7. This is Going to Hurt (BBC1): Adam Kay’s sour, but riveting take on the realities of being a junior doctor in today’s NHS, was brilliantly played by Ben Wishaw (prepared to make the character challengingly unsympathetic) along with a standout supporting turn from Ambika Mod as the ill-fated Shruti (7 episodes).
6. Better Call Saul – Season 6 (Netflix): This final season may not have been the strongest overall, but it was, nonetheless, a satisfying conclusion to the greatest love story TV drama has ever known, and worth the ride if only for the jaw dropping sight of Rhea Seahorn suffering a complete emotional breakdown on an airport bus (13 Episodes).
5. Chucky – Season 2 (Syfy): It’s all to easy to turn your nose up at the psycho killer doll, but this is a lovingly crafted, super smart show (8 episodes).
4. Firebite (AMC+): Not a fan of vampires normally, but this gritty Australian series, set among First Nation Australian vampire hunters in the opal fields north of Adelaide, is an original take on the genre, and layered with deeper meaning (8 episodes).
3. Four Lives (BBC1): Neil McKay’s sensitive account of the murder of four gay men in Barking, exploring how the case was badly mishandled by the Metropolitan Police (4 episodes).
2. Severance (Apple TV): By far the most original genre series for some years. Impossible to explain, you just have to see it, and immerse yourself in it, and enjoy Christopher Walken and John Turturro shining in supporting roles (9 episodes).
1. The White Lotus – Season 2 (HBO/Sky): We had no right to expect that Mike White’s follow-up to his 2021 comedy of manners in a luxury Hawaiian hotel could sustain another 7 hours, but relocated to Taormina in Sicily, and with Jennifer Coolidge and Tom Hollander at the centre of the action it surpassed all expectations (7 episodes).

So how does that stack up? It’s about 80 hours of top quality TV drama. Three of the shows are from the BBC, with nothing cutting through to me from itv at all, although at the time of writing I haven’t had a chance to watch Litvinenko due to the inaccessibility of the itvx platform on a pre 2016 Samsung TV (I mean, seriously???). 2 of the series were available on Sky; Disney+, Syfy and AMC+ had 1 a piece; while Apple+ TV punched above its weight with 2 standout shows. More than half of the shows were rooted in non-naturalistic genre (Sci-Fi or Horror); two were ‘based on real events’; one was an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical book; while just two were fully original ‘real-world’ dramas, with stories made-up specifically for the medium of television.

Tom Hollander & Jennifer Coolidge knocking it out of the Opera House in The White Lotus

The Championship League (Seemed Better at the Time): The next category is perhaps the saddest of them all. These are shows that felt really enjoyable, well made, all trying to do something interesting, but at the end of the year, clearly weren’t as memorable as they wanted to be. I’ve had to struggle to recall more than the positive sensation of watching them.

4. Chivalry (Channel 4): Steve Coogan having a decent stab at MeToo and Cancel Culture in the movie industry, but I’m not sure it added anything very memorable to the debate (6 30 minute episodes).
3. Chloe (BBC1/Amazon): I seem to remember that this was a decent enough psychological thriller when I was watching it, but a few months later I can remember very little about it (6 episodes).
2. Spy Among Friends (itvx): I have a professional interest in the subject matter, and Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis are on top form – possibly Pearce’s best performance – but it’s a bit of a wordy slog, that blurs into a fog after a while, and feels as if it’s going round in circles (6 episodes).
1. Inside Number 9 – Season 7 (BBC2): Normally, Inside Number 9 is one of my annual TV highlights. There were definitely a couple of standout episodes, but perhaps because of the pandemic, less of this series has stayed with me than usual. Having seen the first episode of Season 8, I’m hopeful for a full return to form in 2023. I do absolutely love this show.

Here we had 18 hours of above average material, that, for whatever reason, doesn’t quite hit its target, all of it coming from terrestrial channels. It’s primarily naturalistic, with only Inside Number 9 straying into the paranormal/horror realm.

I bloody love Inside Number 9, even when it isn’t quite hitting the mark, although this episode, The Corn King was Number 9 at its best.

League One (Filled the Time Nicely): and that’s about it, insofar as, mostly, I don’t think they were striving to achieve much more, so, in some ways, more successful than the previous category.

6. Parallels (Disney+): More French YA timeloop/parallel universe malarkey (6 episodes).
5. Around the World in 80 days (BBC1): Decent, if overly woke, updating of the Jules Verne classic, which was made for easy Christmas viewing (8 episodes).
4. Obi-Wan Kenobi
(Disney+) – I’m sick to the back teeth of the whole Star Wars universe but this rolled along nicely, while I wait for the return of Baby Yoda in 2023, MacGregor seemed a bit more committed than usual, and it was a good de-stress, especially for my better half (6 episodes).
3. Upright – Season 2 (Sky): Nowhere near as original and vibrant as the first series but very entertaining nonetheless. Tim Minchin and Milly Alcock are people you are happy to spend your evenings with. You laugh, you cry, you care (8 30 minute episodes).
2. Bad Sisters (Apple+): Not as substantial as some of Sharon Horgan’s other series, and definitely unnecessarily elongated, but easily digestible, and hugely entertaining nonetheless (10 episodes).
1. The Newsreader (BBC2): A bit of a toss up as to which category to put this one. I think it did have pretensions to be a tad more profound than it was, but ultimately was another fun de-stress, and we were rooting for ‘Gay Camera’ all the way (6 episodes).

34 hours of harmless fluff (the episodes tend to be shorter) with BBC and Disney+ sharing the honours. Three have a fantastical element with three naturalistic dramas in the field. A 50:50 split between entirely original material and series based on pre-existing properties.

Sam Reid as the ambitious titular Newsreader, and our personal hero, ‘Gay Camera’ played by Chai Hansen

League Two (Hmmmm…): Which sums up my response to the next category, four shows that absolutely held my attention, and all strove for excellence and originality, but were ultimately a bit all over the place

4. The Tourist (BBC1): An amnesiac survives a car accident and discovers the dodgy reality behind his true identity. A decent thriller that had a good pop at telling a familiar story in an original way, but ultimately didn’t quite crack it, but was a good watch nonetheless (6 episodes).
3. The Silent Sea
(Netflix): Genuinely exciting Korean riff on the whole ‘alien-amok-in-a-research-station’ schtick, with a hugely disappointing ending that had me shouting at my telly in frustration. (8 episodes)
2. Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix): Patchy horror anthology, but with GDT in the mix, everything has the smack of quality about it (8 episodes – that would have made more of an impression kept to 6 or even just 4).
1. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Paramount+): By far my most frustrating series of the year. This had some wonderful set pieces, especially when Bill Nighy picked up the baton from David Bowie’s original alien from the 1976 movie, but veered from the excellent to the lamentable in terms of quality overall. It was a bold show though, and I was sad to see that it did not get renewed (10 episodes).

Another 30 hours spent in front of the telly box mainly grunting with frustration at shows I desperately wanted to be better, but admired for having a go, even if they didn’t quite get there. Just one from the Beeb; two from Netflix; while my favourite was hidden away on Paramount+. Again, there’s a 3:1 ratio of genre to naturalism. With a 50:50 split between original material and adaptation.

Bill Nighy as an ageing Thomas Newton gave me some of my favourite TV moments of 2022

National League (Grrrrrr…): I was engaged enough to sit through the whole of these series but left frustrated or downright annoyed as they fell apart after I’d already committed hours of my life to them.

7. Sherwood (BBC1): James Graham’s critically acclaimed polemic about the aftermath of the 84-85 miners’ strike was at odds with my own experience of those communities, and drove me nuts by not respecting the police procedural superstructure Graham was using to frame his story (6 episodes).
6. Mammals (Amazon): Started engagingly enough but went absolutely nowhere. Ultimately felt like a vanity project by all involved (6 30 minute episodes).
5. Life After Life (BBC2): Kate Atkinson’s much loved novel strove for profundity in its TV iteration but ended up a strangely hollow affair with shades of Baby Herman about it (4 episodes).
4. Trigger Point (itv1): A very very silly thriller with a couple of decent and annoyingly compelling set pieces that left me wondering why I was wasting my life like this, somehow persuaded to stick it out all the way to the insubstantial ending (6 episodes).
3. The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (itv1): As Stonehouse is currently proving on itv1 in 2023, you’d think that people who fake their own deaths might be interesting, but they’re just loathsome and there’s nothing that can be done to redeem them or the people who go along with them (4 episodes).
2. Station Eleven (HBO): This drew me in with a timely and believable pandemic story but degenerated into a load of hippie dippy nonsense about travelling players and Hamlet, making me wish that humanity had been wiped out altogether (10 long long long long episodes).
1. The Peripheral (Amazon): This show hit the ground running with amazing production values and hooking me in with an intriguing premise, before fizzling out to an entirely forgettable anti-climax, and some inexplicably dreadful acting from the British end of the international cast. File under ‘Wasted Opportunity of the Year’ (8 episodes).

All in all, 40 hours of my life I will never get back. I’m intrigued by shows like this. You can see how they got made, but with all of them, at some point, for whatever reason, those involved lost the ability to interrogate their own work to really make them fly. They are mainly naturalistic and the majority come from terrestrial broadcasters. Three are original for TV; three are adaptations; with one based on real events.

The Peripheral – a series that is all dressed up, but with absolutely nowhere to go

National League North (We Get the General Idea): On a good few occasions, I am broadly enjoying a series, but my wife (she with the proper job and a no nonsense approach to TV drama) will sigh after a an episode or two and say: ‘We’ve got the general idea. Do we really need to watch any more?’ All of the following were pretty good, quite possibly superior to the preceding category – and were certainly critically well received for good reason – but fell pray to Gail’s devastating judgement.

9. Slow Horses (Apple+): Everyone loves this series, and I tried, I really did… I watched half of it for god’s sake, but in the end I found it all too mannered and affected and I really didn’t care what happened. I can see how good it is, but once I’d got the general idea, I could take it or leave it (3 out of 6 episodes).
8. Wreck (BBC3): After being gripped by Red Rose, the bubblegum palette of BBC3’s next YA horror, might have contributed to the sense, after just one perfectly entertaining episode, that there was no pressing need to go any further. I’d got the general idea (1 out of 6 episodes).
7. Ipcress File (itv1): Stylish, well crafted, but after two episodes… we’d got the general idea (2 out of 6 episodes).
6. The Old Man (Disney+): After an excellent start with Bridges and Lithgow at the top of their game, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and despite the quality on offer… we’d got the general idea (3 out of 7 episodes).
5. This England (Sky): Pointless and premature reconstruction of the Johnson premiership. Undoubtedly well crafted, but because we’d only just lived it, we’d had more than enough of the general idea (2 out of 6 episodes).
4. Andor (Disney+): Supposedly the Star Wars series for people who don’t like Star Wars, and executed with a refreshing verité panache – it was still Star Wars, an imagined universe surely duller than any other in artistic history. Hats off to them for trying to give it some kind of grounding in emotional reality, but as my wife put it, ‘They’re just talking bollocks, aren’t they? – albeit that Anton Lesser was talking his bollocks with Shakespearian authority (3 out of 12 episodes).
3. Rogue Heroes (BBC1): ‘From the makers of Peaky Blinders’ screamed the publicity (endlessly)… and this rock ‘n’ roll account of the early days of the SAS was classily done, but with so much emphasis on style, we’d soon got the idea, and bailed after two perfectly enjoyable episodes (2 out of 6 episodes).
2. House of the Dragon (HBO/Sky); My wife and I were glued to all eight seasons of Game of Thrones and were looking forward to this but once it started we had that grinding sense of having seen it all before and having more than a general idea of the world we were in. We again bailed after two perfectly enjoyable episodes (2 out of 10 episodes).
1. Sandman (Netflix): Love Neil Gaiman. Love the Sandman books. Great cast. Great production values. After two excellently executed episodes… we’d got the general idea, and I wasn’t exactly bored, but I really couldn’t be arsed to watch any more (2 out of 11 episodes).

In this category I watched 20 out of a potential 70 episodes – ! – saving myself about 50 hours of telly watching. As I say, most of this was critically well received but by the end of the year I didn’t feel as if I’ve missed anything. Interestingly, while just under half of these are fantasy/horror/sci-fi, three of the remaining five series are highly stylised in their own way, with only The Old Man and Slow Horses playing out as a naturalistic thrillers where the content is allowed to speak for itself. This may say more about me than the programmes themselves, insofar as I struggle to engage when the authorial and/or creative affectations get in the way, but I suspect there is a significant demographic who respond similarly.

Exquisitely realised but, well, after I’d got the general idea there was nothing to keep me there. I felt guilty because presumably they’d all gone to an awful lot of trouble on our behalf.

National League South (Gave up after two eps): I had high hopes for all of these – either glowingly reviewed or recommended highly by friends – and gave them the benefit of the doubt for two whole episodes… before giving up in boredom or annoyance. Here they are in order of guilt:
5. Moon Knight (Disney+): I’m profoundly uninterested in the Marvel universe, so I can’t quite remember why I gave this a go. I think I read a few encouraging reviews, but… but… I just don’t get the whole Superhero/Superhuman powers thing. The genre means so much to so many people I really want to be able to make that connection, but try as I might it’s the fallibility of being human that makes me interested in stories. Once you move beyond that – it’s nothing but narrative cheating – the characters cease to be interesting. I can just about hack Spiderman but I keep trying to find another one that might engage me. (2 of 6 eps).
4. Crossfire (BBC1): While it didn’t get great reviews, a lot of people were drawn into this protracted and unlikely tale of Keeley Hawes toughing it out against a hotel spree shooter. I soldiered on but even two thirds of the way through I gave zero shits about the outcome (2 of 3 eps).
3. The English (BBC2): Lots of great reviews, and my friends going nuts for it, but after two eps I was done. I just don’t ‘get’ Hugo Blick. Mannered and affected, I find it impossible to care (2 of 6 eps).
2. Somewhere Boy (Channel 4): Another show that everyone seemed to love, but I didn’t believe a word of it. I tried, I really tried (2 of 8 eps).
1. 22. Juli (Sky): I feel awful about this. In October I was at the International Screenwriters Conference in Copenhagen where one session contained a moving interview with Sara Johnson the writer of the Norwegian TV drama recounting the Oslo and Utøya attacks of 2011. It sounded amazing, and no one could fail to be impressed by the integrity of a process which sought to depict events without exploiting or exaggerating them for dramatic purposes. But… but… I gave up after two episodes finding it oddly indigestible, and frankly a bit of a slog. While undoubtedly more admirable than This England it suffered from the same sense that, stripped of artistic endeavour, it left me wondering what it was for, and thinking I’d rather see a documentary. A horrible, guilt inducing reminder that drama has to do more than simply report events (2 of 6 eps).

I managed 9 hours of the potential 25 hours of fun here. To be fair, my lack of enthusiasm probably says more about me than the shows themselves.

I don’t want to be flip about 22 Juli, so here’s a picture of Keeley Hawes on her phone (as I was) in the daft-as-a-brush series, Crossfire

Isthmian League (Gave up after – or during! – the first episode): I watched five of these to review them for Sci-Fi Bulletin and probably wouldn’t have bothered otherwise, but I approached the rest with genuine hope for some kind of entertainment. So, in no particular order…
17. DMZ (HBO): Something to do with a second American civil war. Instantly forgettable (1 of 4 eps).
16. Moonhaven (AMC+): Nonsensical drivel about something or other on the moon, looking like rural Ireland (1 of 6 eps)
15. Yakamoz S-245 (Netflix): Submarine version of Into the Night. Why? (1 of 7 eps)
14. The Fear Index (Sky Atlantic): Sterile adaptation of one of Robert Harris’s less interesting books (1 of 4 eps)
13. Rings of Power (Amazon): I am less interested in Middle Earth than I am in the Star Wars universe and that’s saying something, but obviously the Tolkien estate will do just fine without my attentions (I lasted 30 minutes of the 8 episodes).
12. The Watcher (Netflix): Straight to DVD tediosity (1 of 7 eps)
11. The Undeclared War (Channel 4): Peter Kosminsky proving that he should steer clear of anything vaguely tech or sci-fi. Overblown enactable nonsense. Computer definitely says ‘no’ (1 of 6 Eps).
10. Lazarus Project (Sky Max): Tired timeloop drivel on a par with the BBC series Paradox – the benchmark for bad sci-fi. Astonishingly this has been renewed for a second season (1 of 8 eps).
9. The Capture (BBC1): After about ten minutes I realised I’d sat through the first season of this earnest deep fake nonsense. One of those series where there’s an idea and some characters and you find yourself not believing in or caring about either (1 of 6 eps).
8. The Control Room (BBC1): 999 call centre nonsense reliant on clichés, coincidences and over-acting (1 of 3 eps).
7. No Return (itv1): Lacklustre itv thing, not quite based on a true story, reeking of straight to video (1 of 4 eps).
6. The Midwich Cuckoos (Sky): Laughably, excruciatingly, cheap and dated dramatisation of the John Wyndham classic. A real wasted opportunity. I was a bit sad about quite how bad this was (1 of 7 eps).
5. Wednesday (Netflix): Popular well-received show, but enough with the kids at supernatural schools already. Not for me (1 of 8 eps).
4. The Devil’s Hour (Amazon): Something about a social worker and Peter Capaldi and other lives or memories or premonitions… after 40 minutes of over-acting I didn’t care either way (1 of 6 eps)
3. Inside Man (BBC1): Lukewarm Hannibal Lector rehash. Why? (1 of 4 eps)
2. The Responder (BBC1): This got rave reviews and everyone I know loved it. I’m clinically allergic to Martin Freeman. I’m sure he’s very good and a lovely human being but something about actors with tics that has me scrabbling for the remote. Sorry (1 of 6 eps).
1. Let The Right One In (Showtime): This one made me angry. I love the source material having read the book twice, seen both the films on multiple occasions, and directed the stage play. Here they turned the brilliant premise of the story on its head and committed a crime against fiction. Horrible (1 of 10 eps).

There was one other show which has only tempted me to a single instalment so far, and that’s Ralph and Katie. It’s still on my Sky box, waiting for me to watch it, and I have a professional interest in drama featuring characters and actors with Learning Difficulty/Disability so I hope to get round to it at some point – one ep definitely isn’t enough – but… but… it keeps getting pushed to the back of the queue. Whether that’s about me or the show, I’m not sure.

So, Ralph and Katie aside, I soldiered through 17 of over 100 hours of unbearable drivel. Okay, three or four of these were well-received and/or popular with their target audience, but honestly the rest of them… urghhh. Eleven of the series are sci-fi or supernatural in some way, which is perhaps an indicator of how hard it is to create fantasy with real heart. Stress test that concept, peeps! While there are four BBC shows on this list, one of them was a big hit despite my allergic reaction, so the terrestrial channel isn’t as over-represented in the turkey factory as some BBC-bashers would have us believe. Again we have a 50:50 split between original material and adaptations or spin-offs from pre-existing properties.

I am rarely angered by the poor quality of a series but the premise of the TV iteration of Let The Right One In had me fuming.

Central and South Norfolk League Division Four (That difficult second album…): Sometimes you really enjoy a show but find yourself wishing they hadn’t bothered trying to reprise it.
3. Raised by Wolves – Season 2 (HBO/Sky): Season 1 was a good watch, even if it went a bit mental in the series finale. I was looking forward to a continuation of the story, but they seemed to have cherry picked all the worst mis-steps from the first outing and gaily set off from there in Season 2 (1 of 8 Eps).
2. The Great – Season 2 (Hulu/Starzplay): This pungent account of of Catherine the Great’s stormy relationship with Peter III of Russia was one of the things that got me through the darkest days of lockdown, but returning to it felt oddly unnecessary. Perhaps it was too closely associated with that scary time in our lives (1 of 10 eps).
1. Resident Alien – Season 2 (Syfy/Sky): The 2021 introduction to Alan Tudyk’s brilliant characterisation of the Alien Harry Vanderspeigle balanced comedy science fiction with a heartfelt story of a stranger in a strange land. I couldn’t wait for its return only to discover that it had been thrown out of balance and become a gags-per-minute sitcom. Horrible. (1 of 15 eps).

By only watching three out of a potential 33 episodes, I saved myself a good thirty hours in front of the TV. To be fair, For All Mankind went completely pear-shaped in its second season but returned to form this year, so all is not necessarily lost.

I shall treasure the pleasure I got from Season 1 of Resident Alien

Wednesday Night Kick About on the Rec When It’s Pissing Down With Rain (Why would you do that?): Or, that moment when you see that a show is back for another season and you grimace and say, ‘Seriously?’
4. The Pact – Season 2 (BBC1): Seriously? I didn’t meet anyone who rated this show (6 eps)
3. Bloodlands – Season 2 (BBC1): Nor this one. And it got a longer run second time round. Mystifying (6 eps).
2. Outlaws – Season 2 (BBC1): Okay so at least this was reasonably popular, I’m told, but I still don’t know anyone who actually watched it (6 eps)
1. The Split – Season 3! (BBC1): Rich people getting divorced, again and again and again. I must be missing something (6 eps).

While I’m always keen to defend the BBC… these are all BBC shows. Go figure. Netflix commissions an awful lot of dross but it does seem to be a bit more careful about its recommissions, but on the plus side, 24 hours of telly I had no desire to watch at all.

I assume it’s very good, but don’t think I inhabit the same universe as the audience who want more and more of The Split

So is that it? Not quite. There were a few teams in search of a league, namely the television single drama, the loneliest dramatic form on broadcast media. I watched three this year – four if you include the Detectorists Christmas special – I don’t think there were many more – and I enjoyed them all. Christmas Carole on Sky retold Dickens with a surprisingly fresh modern spin; Then Barbara Met Alan was an engaging account of disability rights activists in the 1980 and 90s; Floodlights was a disturbing and upsetting dramatisation of the child abuse scandal surrounding the football scout Barry Bennell; and Detectorists offered a welcome top-up of one of the BBC’s best comedy dramas. The reason I mention these is that our schedules and streaming platforms are so dominated by series, it feels as if we are losing the art of well told stand-alone story, perhaps not big enough to sustain a feature film, but worth 75 to 90 minutes of our time, without being contorted to run and run and run until the life has been drained out of it.

Challenging, informative, engaging, economical and punchy – Then Barbara Met Alan. We mustn’t forget the art – and then power – of the single TV drama.

So. Is there anything to conclude from all this, apart from the fact that the Marmoset watched far far far too much telly?

I watched about 255 hours of TV drama, out of a potential 453 hours of material I might have endured had I completed every single series, which means I lost interest in just under half the material for whatever reason. Without another year to compare it to I have no idea whether that’s good or bad. Personal taste is obviously a factor, but there was a good deal of average, below average or completely misconceived product in there.

What I know for sure is that when people talk about the 1960s or 70s or 80s being ‘golden’ eras for TV drama, I doubt I could have come up with 80-100 hours that could reasonably be labeled excellent in some way as I have here. I lived through those decades and most of what was served up to us, from a much more limited range, was pretty dreadful really, with just a few standout shows. We enjoyed it because it was all there was and it defined the times in which we lived.

Back to 2022, I’ve given up on continuing drama (soaps) almost entirely, partly because I’ve spent a quarter of a century writing it, but also because it feels like a very tired dramatic format when the stories are so repetitive and melodramatic, when television is capable of so much more. Perhaps I’ll return to it one day. It’s certainly true that too many series are over extended, and that there is surely space for more single drama, but the idea that the BBC is any worse at producing memorable drama than any other platform doesn’t appear to be born out at all, and neither is the popular notion that Netflix is somehow offering the Gold Standard for TV storytelling.

I think I’ve just taken a VERY long time to prove what we knew from William Goldman all along.

My resolution for 2023?

Get out more.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

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First World Problems And My Pen Of Doom!

31 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by Martin Jameson in Boris Johnson, Brexit, Civil War, Politics, Proroguing Parliament, Radio Drama, Satire, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

9/11, BBC, Civil Unrest, Politics

As visitors to this page will know, back in the heady, carefree days of 2017 I was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a five-part drama imagining the UK plunging into a bloody civil war some time sort of now-ish.

FWP WIDE LARGE FONT

This was to be no sci-fi melodrama but a tale of a Radio 4-style (i.e. middle-class) family’s battle for survival in the face of social and infrastructure collapse, set against a thoroughly researched and war-gamed political backstory.

I called it First World Problems. See what I did there?

To that end, I assembled an array of in-house BBC expertise, academics and parliamentary advisers and researchers – top people who mostly approached the task as a sort of dystopian parlour game, albeit often with a fair degree of wry amusement.

I sat down with one senior political analyst in the airy canteen at BBC Millbank. Well, for starters, we decided it would help if there was someone in the background of my scenario with the civil service in their sights. This was for the BBC so my hypothetical crisis had to work with governments of every hue. On the left that might be a fictional fixer in the image of, say, a Seamus Milne, and on the right it could be someone like, oh, I don’t know… Dominic Cummings?

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 11.06.31

We dared to imagine this man pulling the strings at Number Ten. Absurd!

How we laughed.

That was two years ago, and it seemed little more than a flight of darkly satirical fancy. When Cummings’s tenure was announced in July, my stomach turned.

Back in the canteen, my oracle postulated that with the civil service under attack, I’d now need an irreconcilable rift in the ruling superstructure to make my story credible. What if, following a chaotic Brexit, the infrastructure is cracking under the strain: Northern Ireland is subsumed into the Republic, Scotland bolts for the exit with an illegal IndyRef 2.0 resulting in a unilateral declaration of independence? There’s a scramble for control of the nukes at Faslane resulting in an armed and deadly conflagration. The border is closed, and Westminster goes nuts. MPs from all parties try to rein in the Executive, who in turn declares a state of emergency and prorogues Parliament, literally locking the MPs out of the building.

“I mean, I can’t really see it happening”, mused my adviser. Well, as Eric Morecambe might have said, “All the right notes, even if not necessarily in the right order”.

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 10.52.12

Eric Morecambe takes a look at my projections back in 2017

There have been rumbles about prorogation all summer, but commentator after commentator insisted it would never happen. It was staying safely fictional, until Wednesday morning.

Please God any resemblance to real events stops right here!

However, within minutes there was speculation that it would turbo charge Nicola Sturgeon’s drive for a second referendum. As to whether that would ever be granted, who knows? If Westminster tried to block it, it doesn’t feel out of the ball park to imagine an enraged Scotland doing it anyway. And if they did? There’s a creeping sense with the departure of Ruth Davidson that perhaps Mr Johnson (or Mr Cummings??) doesn’t really care if Scotland cuts loose. It would make it easier for the Tories to hold a majority at Westminster if they did, but a whiplash fracturing of the Union would, as in my drama, be dangerously destabilising.

My excluded fictional MPs form a Democratic Alliance, which sits in an alternative chamber across the city (today suggested by more than one political player in the real world).

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 15.20.53

An article in Friday’s Guardian

The country splits across the middle, with the big metropolitan authorities – the northern cities – siding with the rogue DA, while the south sticks with the Government. The Royal Family is forced to take sides. We all expect Elizabeth to stay neutral but who knows what Charles or William would do faced with future decisions, especially if the democratic mandate is unclear. This, in turn, begs the question of the military and the police. To whom are they now accountable? To whom are they loyal? What happens if they are split?

Other advisers warned of food and medicine shortages (now being prepared for), not to mention the fragility of the National Grid with multi-generator cascade failures (tick) as the fine balance of our energy infrastructure is disrupted.

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 14.45.24

When the power went, people ‘self evacuated’ and walked along the tracks.

Never mind lightning strikes, imagine if Scotland stopped exporting its power across the border to England. In my dystopian Tomorrow, they who control the National Grid Control Centre at Wokingham don’t just control our ability to keep the lights on, they control the internet, the mobile phone network, our ability to get petrol out of the pumps at filling stations, and the BACS system so integral to our cashless world. They control the country.

Far fetched? Ridiculous? Hysterical?

That’s what I thought in 2017, and just look at how much of that has either come true or is creeping nearer to the front of the queue ready to be ticked off the list. Even worse, look at how much we have normalised these things, how quickly we ‘get used’ to them. That, for me, is the most dangerous part of this. Only yesterday I was conversing with one of my former advisers who seemed content that apathy and inertia would stop any major civil unrest happening as if he hadn’t noticed that we are already careering down the slide with no idea what’s at the bottom. Like the old joke about how an optimist  is a person who falls out of a twenty storey window only to shout to an office worker on the tenth floor, ‘All right so far!’.

Just before I penned my radio epic I had delivered a first draft of a police procedural about a series of murders of gay men initially mistaken for terrorism but which ultimately turn out to be the work of a closeted muslim guy unable to resolve deep personal inner turmoil. I delivered it to my producer the day before the Orlando Club shootings about which there has been much similar (but as yet unproven) speculation. The BBC’s Editorial Policy team decreed I would have to rewrite the whole thing even though my script pre-dated reality. Last year I wrote another procedural about the murder of a man, thrown from the window of a Manchester Hotel. Pretty much exactly that happened almost exactly two months after I delivered the script. Although my hotel was absolutely fictional, the imaginative starting point had been the same building.

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 14.50.24

The police forensic tent outside Manchester’s Britannia Hotel in September 2018

Of course, these are simply unsettling coincidences.

Or are they?

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 16.04.52.png

The chicken or the egg?

When First World Problems finally aired in 2018 I was accused by organised Twitter trolls of trying to ferment unrest, but whilst the causal accusation is ridiculous, as with all dystopian fiction, if you can construct a possible narrative from your imagination, no matter how seemingly implausible, then that narrative can become reality. A few years back Prof Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw wrote a book about quantum physics called, ‘Everything That Can Happen Will Happen’, but in the realm of human behaviour I’m increasingly inclined to think this is true, quantum or no quantum. If a person, or a group of people, can behave in a certain way, no matter how idiotic, then sooner or later someone will. Just ask anyone who has ever had to design a safety system.

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 15.07.47

When I first saw this I thought it was a spoof…  It wasn’t. Although I have to admit a certain pride at being considered worthy of the BBC Death Cult Team.

A month after 9/11, two dozen Hollywood screenwriters were reputedly called in to the Pentagon hypothesise about ingenious and dastardly ways hostile agents could cause death and destruction across the US. I’m having difficulty verifying this, but if they weren’t, then perhaps they should have been. The dystopian and nihilistic imagination isn’t just the preserve of storytellers.

If we can imagine something bad coming, it’s worth taking our imaginations seriously – that’s what imagination is for after all – and then, hopefully, we can head our nightmares off at the pass before they become reality.

Having said that, my wife wants me to use my Pen Of Doom to write a drama about how the Amazon Rainforest is saved, or even better, some dialogue featuring a few winning lottery numbers.

And what about my fictional middle class Radio 4 family? Well you can still hear what happens to them here…

Suffice it to say when they flee the city to hide out in the now intensely nationalist North Wales, it doesn’t end well. They’re English after all.

Ethnic cleansing, anyone?

Screenshot 2019-08-31 at 15.43.26

Syrian migrants crossing Hungary in 2015.

This image was the spark for First World Problems. Although not ethnic cleansing per se, I wanted to examine how my comfortable, white, English, Radio 4 loving family could end up in exactly this situation in our own green and pleasant land.

I’m still praying that my dystopian hypothetical stays precisely that.

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The Revelation of the Marmoset

13 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by Martin Jameson in Brexit, Journalism, Political Satire, Politics, Satire

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Donald Trump, Politics, religion

‘Ande soe yt was thatte thye people of Albion looked acrosse the water to theire cousins yn the New Worlde who were rul-ed by a dylusyonal rhyhte wynged narssyssyste ande theye sayeth: ‘We want one of those’… ande theire wyshe was granted ande yt was trulye thye ende of dayes.’

Amen.

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Here Is the News (I Agree With)

03 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by Martin Jameson in Journalism, Main Stream Media, Media, Politics, Social Media, Writing

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Tags

BBC News, Bias, Channel 4 News, Cockroft Rutherford Annual Lecture, Dorothy Byrne, Fran Unsworth, Impartiality, Jon Snow, Mark Kermode, More Or Less, Politics Live

Last week, as a proud alumnus of Manchester University, I attended the annual Cockroft Rutherford lecture, given by Dorothy Byrne, Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4. She argued the case for strong political journalism as a key pillar of our democracy, coupled with an analysis of why those who wish to subvert it have turned their weapons on those who seek to report on them.

You can see her whole lecture here. It’s about an hour long and the lecture proper doesn’t start until about twenty-five minutes in. It’s very entertaining and incisive. Well worth a looksee.

Screenshot 2019-06-03 at 09.33.32

In the colour factor corner…

However, in a largely convincing account of the nuanced meaning of due impartiality, Ms Byrne seemed to have a bit of a blindspot as to some of her own channel’s output. She took a good deal of righteous delight in attacking the BBC for giving undue airtime to climate deniers in the name of balance, conveniently forgetting that it was Channel 4 who led the way on this with The Great Global Warming Swindle back in 2007. She decided that a six part BBC documentary about David Cameron’s tenure as PM would be a waste of money – without having seen it (it may be, it may not be – who knows? There’s certainly plenty to say about his rise to power and, deride it or not, his pivotal premiership 2010-2016. Her uninformed, prejudicial dismissiveness was hardly setting a good journalistic example) and she took great pride in quoting a statistic that said that 90% of Channel 4 News’s audience believed that their coverage was truly independent, the highest of any mainstream news programme.

Duh. Of course they do. They’re Channel 4 News’s audience.

When people say – as many in the Cockroft audience did – that they think Channel 4 News is more independent, or more balanced than the BBC what they mean is, they agree with its very particular Guardian style Liberal/Left – and pro-Remain – agenda. They want Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy to express their righteous indignation at people with Right Wing/Brexit views.

I like Channel 4 News. I watch it every day.

Screenshot 2019-06-03 at 10.18.58

Jon Snow – concern etched on his face. His particular brand of liberal left hand wringing can be pretty wearisome. I can wring my own lefty liberal hands, ta, Jon.

I like The Guardian. I have a subscription. Not because these news outlets are impartial (which they aren’t) but because they have a very clear agenda, which throws a clear light on things, albeit from a very distinct angle. As long as you know what that bias is – and it is bias – you can evaluate what the truth may be. A bit like a Mark Kermode film review. I listen to Mark every week, but there’s no getting away from it, he likes all sorts of tedious shite – however, as long as I know what sort of tedious shite he likes I can work out whether the movie is worth seeing or not.

Screenshot 2019-06-03 at 11.03.56

A terrific critic, but oh Lordy, I’ve felt my life draining away watching some of the films he has recommended.

I prefer BBC News. Why? Well for the reasons Fran Unsworth  enunciated in yesterday’s Observer in response to this broadside the previous week.

Screenshot 2019-06-03 at 10.22.42.png

And in the red corner….

It tells me all sorts of things I DON’T want to hear. Its commentators come from all corners of the political spectrum, not just the ones I agree with. I have to work a bit harder to make my own judgements. The interviewers aren’t trying to express my rage (I can do rage on my own, thank you very much). It’s not presented to me wrapped up in a parcel of satisfying righteous indignation.

Many of my friends on Social Media vehemently disagree with me, insisting that while ‘we’ may be able to divine the truth from such output, most viewers aren’t bright enough, and will be easily swayed by, say, a Nigel Farage, unless the interviewer leaps on them and tells them – and tells the viewers that they’re wrong. Angrily!!

Bloody hell, that’s patronising. And not just a little arrogant as well.

Core to our democracy is the trust that people, by and large, are pretty smart and that everyone has the skills to make considered judgements providing they are given the tools. That’s far preferable than the presenters or interviewers editorialising on our behalf. That’s presumably why the BBC has invested so much into the Reality Check team and they are referred to most days on the BBC TV News. But it is our responsibility as an audience and as participants in the democratic process to make the effort not to go out and make a cup of tea when Chris Morris tips up, or when the fact checker feeds back on PMQs on BBC2’s Politics Live which he does EVERY week. Expecting to be spoon fed won’t help the democratic process – and hats off to the BBC for constantly pointing people to Reality Check web pages, Reality Check news items, the very brilliant More or Less on BBC Radio 4, The Briefing Room etc etc etc.

Screenshot 2019-06-03 at 10.27.01

This is the programme that does more than any other to tool the listener up to root out bullshit for themselves…

So I will never say: “Well of course I understand what’s going on but it’s the stupid masses who don’t… so they need to be told what to think.” I see an awful lot of BBC bashing social media from people who take that attitude, and it depresses me. Just as in drama – my own personal trade – no one ever wrote a decent script assuming the audience to be more stupid than the writer.

So, for this Marmoset, it’s bloody amazing that the BBC has the courage to go on doing this, and we should treasure it, not bleat on Social Media because it isn’t saying precisely what we as individuals think. The day it does that is the day it has stopped being News and become our own personal echo chamber.

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The Marmoset’s Bottom Ten 2017 Desperate Election Clichés

10 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by Martin Jameson in Conspiracy Theories, Economics, Facebook, General Election 2017, Jeremy Corbyn, Journalism, Labour Leadership, Labour Party, Main Stream Media, Media, Political Satire, Politics, Satire, Social Media, Theresa May, Twitter

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Electoral Turnout, Laura Kuenssberg, Media Blaming, Opinion Polls

Last summer, in the heat of Owen Smith’s challenge to Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership of the UK Labour Party, this particular Marmoset pissed off a lot of people, blogging about the Bottom Ten Lazy Political Generalisations propagated by the moon-eyed/swivel-eyed (delete where not applicable) acolytes of Mr Jez-We-Can, who wander the echoing labyrinth of Social Media, their faces periodically melting like Indiana Jones Nazis whenever said Echo dares to mutter: ‘Actually, perhaps he can’t’.

1024px-Mould_in_meat_and_rice

BTW When I say ‘heat’ I’m referring more to the foetid steam that rises from microwaved three-week-old leftover rice pudding.  It has the capacity to scald but it smells like sour baby poop.

Oh, by the way, if you’re hoping for a measured commentary on the lefty social media chaterati response to General Election 2017, then you’ve come to the wrong place. I warn you now, there will be swearing.

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The Marmoset is NOT IN  A GOOD MOOD.

The more emollient voices chided me: ‘But surely, Jeremy’s tenure as leader is precipitating a debate we should have had years ago.’ Ehm, hello?? I think we did actually have this debate, certainly in the 1980s and quite possibly a good few decades before that as well. The answer was as clear then – as it is horribly clear now. Remember this guy?

karl-marx-quotes-4

Well he was wrong about that as well. History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as an even worse fucking tragedy – except this time the Marmoset is 57 years old and doesn’t know if he’ll live to see the left of British politics recover.

But… I hold my hands up. I was wrong. Just like Karl.
Yes.
I’ve said it.
The Marmoset was 100% wrong.
I repeatedly intimated in my August 2016 blog that certain political tropes on social media were intellectually lazy. What a load of utter bollox. No! Here we are, two years after the train wreck of the 2015 General Election; two awful Labour Leadership elections; not to mention the EU Referendum, and the same people are churning out the same clichéd, simplistic, reductive, un-evidenced nonsense they spouted throughout all those sickeningly ill-fated campaigns.

This amount of wilful self delusion isn’t lazy – it’s bloody hard work.

Recently, for the sake of my blood pressure (and everybody else’s patience), I disconnected myself from FB because, far from learning a single thing from recent debacles, the quality of popular dialogue on the left of Social Media appears to be sinking to new lows. But if Tweeters and FBers insist on inventing new tiresome political clichés/excuses/expressions of moral and political outrage, then I reserve the right to fashion another ‘Bottom Ten’.

I won’t bother with the whole Alan Freeman ‘pop-pickers’ thing.

Screen Shot 2016-08-09 at 10.01.30

‘Not ‘alf!’

Well… ok, just to get us going: ‘Coming in at number ten!’

10) ‘The real reason Theresa May called this election is…’

I’ve seen a few bizarre reasons touted, but the main one is that it supposedly puts to bed accusations of Tory electoral fraud at the 2015 General Election – a story championed by Michael Crick at C4 News. Ehmmm… How does that work exactly? Any electoral fraud charges won’t just go away because an election is called. Even if every suspected MP stands down at this election – and I don’t believe that they are, certainly not at the time of writing – then issue remains very much live and will re-emerge if the CPS decided to press charges. (NB. Since writing this blog, events have moved on and the CPS have decided not to press charges in all but one constituency, South Thanet, where a decision remains to be made – but my point very much still stands.)

I’ve also seen posts suggesting that Theresa May’s real reason for going to the country is something vaguely to do with Philip May making loads of cash (no, I don’t understand that either) – or, that other golden oldie, to cover up accusations of a paedophile ring at the heart of the establishment. Wha…? Regular visitors to the Marmoset may remember what this dubious little monkey had to say about conspiracy theories.

This election is about her control of Brexit and maximising the Tory majority at a time when the opposition is at its weakest thanks to the poor and unpopular stewardship of Jeremy Corbyn. No more, no less.

occams_03

9) ‘You can’t trust the Polls!  Look what happened in 2015, Brexit, Trump etc….’

Polling gets a lot of stuff wrong, because while it’s a science from which we demand exactitude, the parameters are constantly shifting, and it’s a challenge for the methodology to keep up. But statisticians are generally smart cookies and able to learn from their mistakes, so before we start bleating about how we can ignore the polls, it’s worth a click or two (if you can be arsed before proclaiming) to check the facts. Let’s look at the oft cited straws at which poll-deniers are wont to grasp:

The 2015 General Election: There were 92 polls during the campaign, 17 of which were dead heats. In 42 of the remainder Labour had a small lead, and in the other 33 the Conservatives led, sometimes by as much as 6%. The Tories won with a 7% lead. So the clues were there for anyone who wanted to find them, and the inaccuracy, such as it was, concealed a far greater advantage for the Conservative Party. Something very similar happened in 1992 when, despite only garnering a small parliamentary majority, John Major defied Labour-favouring polls by scoring the highest popular vote of any Prime Minister in UK electoral history.

The EU Referendum:  These polls were a bit more accurate as a whole, with quite a few anticipating the result closely… and where they were wrong, favouring the Remain side –  yes, you guessed it – they hid an actual bias towards the less liberally inclined Leave voter.

The 2016 US Election: The polls were derided for not predicting Trump’s historic (!) victory, but Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million votes, so they were hardly out of the ball park.

And what do all these have in common? The polling critically over estimates the level of Labour/Left support. There are some voices suggesting that polling companies are trying to factor in this left leaning bias from previous surveys, and have overcooked their compensatory mechanisms. The local elections with an 11% Tory lead as opposed to the 18% predicted in national polls might give this weight, but then again, voting patterns in local contests are different from those in general elections, so frankly, who knows. What we do know is that a polling error that would wipe out a consistent 18% lead has no historical precedent.

‘Ah yes!’ Exclaim the Moon-Swivellers, ‘but Jeremy defied 200/1 odds to become Labour Leader in the first place!!!’ Hmmm… that’ll be with a self nominating electorate, many of whom paid three quid for the privilege. It doesn’t count. It really, really doesn’t count.

bbdd341d42a0573a63f5716ef5bd2fe21e58c0fb

The Only Poll That Counts… …and it’s usually more conservative than the pretend ones.

8) ‘The Main Stream Media is biased against Him!!! ‘
(That’ll be ‘Him’ with a capital ‘H’ – I mean, He deserves one, surely)

Oh god, I am SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO bored of this one… and anyone who’s dabbled with the Marmoset will know I’ve jabbered on about it at some length before.

But sadly – tediously! – it seems that the point can’t be made too often. Aside from whether there’s anything like the bias that the Facebook-erati claim (there is and there isn’t, that’s for another day) – or whether bias either way is ’cause’ or ‘effect’ – the tiresome bit is the endless tinnitus whine of the complaint itself.

If you, Dear Reader, are inclined to media-blaming, convinced that potential Labour voters are swayed from their true course by the establishment, Oxbridge cabal at the BBC; or the mere existence of Murdoch sponsored front pages in newsagents; or Krishnan Guru-Murthy with his devastating page one questions for Jeremy Corbyn on Channel 4 News; or The Daily Mail which, for some reason, these potential Labour voters are already reading (yeah… go figure that one…); or… or…. or…. (cough, splutter, aneurysm) …LAURA KUENSSBERG (‘Burn the witch!! Burn the witch!!!!!)…

…if you are one of these people whinging and moaning and mewling and puking about media bias, what you are actually saying is: ‘I’m really smart!! I’m intellectual, me. I know THE TRUTH. But out there are lots of STUPID people who will sway with the wind like moronic sheep – unlike ME, far cleverer than the dimwit lumpen masses who are incapable of independent thought, but, annoyingly, on whom Labour victory depends!!

Sorry… was I ranting. Breathe.

A common trope on FB and Twitter is to berate the BBC for giving too much air time to Nigel Farage and UKIP. Let’s ignore the four million license fee payers who voted UKIP at the last election and concede that perhaps there is some weight to this criticism. What just happened at the recent May local elections? Wipeout for UKIP. And it looks very much as if June will see them swept from the arena once and for all, despite all that media coverage.

Why? Because people aren’t stupid. They are capable of independent thought, and the former UKIP voter has made the quite rational judgement that their time is gone, and that Paul Nuttall is even more ridiculous than Nigel Farage.

It’s a shame really, because right now anyone seriously wanting Labour victory could do with an electorate divided along UKIP lines… perhaps if you still have media-blaming proclivities you could write to the BBC and ask for a bit more UKIP propaganda to help shore up some Labour marginals!

Why oh why

Oh yeah, and while we’re at it… The Main Stream Media? What are you actually talking about? Newspapers with their ever declining circulations? Or would that be Social Media, Facebook, Twitter – used by billions of people – where people talk bollocks to their mates who already agree with them or read lengthy blogs written by self-opinionated gits tapping away in their attics…

Oh… hang on…

7) ‘If only people would get out and vote, we could swing this election!!’

When His Corbyness first caressed the wipe-clean leatherette arm-rests of his Labour throne, he countered those who dared suggest that he needed to woo the centre ground – or that polling indicated a somewhat oceanic lack of popular support – by boldly asserting there was an army of non-voters – The Disenfranchised, The Young Pee-Pul – who he would galavanise into registering, and who would propel him into 10 Downing Street at the head of a revolutionary tsunami.

Two years later, the tsunami is looking a tad like the wash from a drifting pedalo, and while no one, not even the Marmoset at his most curmudgeonly, would refute the importance of getting people to exercise their hard-won democratic rights…

…swinging from this particular twig, licking on my favourite rainforest exudate (look it up), I notice the bark is starting to splinter, and I offer this word of warning to anyone blaming Labour’s woes on low turnout – and seeking salvation by rousing the apathetic masses into the polling booth.

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Yum! I love a tasty exudate!

The inconvenient truth is that there’s no particular evidence to suppose that those who don’t vote are necessarily Labour supporters. Indeed, post war history implies the opposite. The turnout for the EU referendum – 72% – was unusually high compared to recent General Elections – between 7% and 12% higher than the last four elections. 2001 (59%) and 2005 (61%) had low turnouts – both Labour victories… 2010 (65%) and 2015 (66%), the turnout went up, and it favoured the conservatives. 1992 when John Major  was helped by a near record turnout of 77%.

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When Blair defeated Major five years later it was on a turnout down by 6%. 
Other record turnouts include 1950 when Clement Attlee’s legendary, landmark government was ousted by Winston Churchill on an 84% turnout. Attlee’s victory was on a turnout twelve points lower.
 And my understanding from everything I’ve read about it, is that the higher turnout at the EU referendum favoured Vote Leave. So when we shout to the Social Media heavens for a greater turnout on June 8th, the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ comes to mind.

But given that people who don’t vote, er… don’t vote, then of course, this is, by definition, unknowable. If we accept that as true, I tentatively suggest that making the disenfranchised a core part of one’s campaign might be just a little fruitless. Even assuming we want to improve things for the disenfranchised (I know I do!) it’s still a better use of energy and resources to target one’s efforts at the people who actually go to polling booths, and who might be persuaded to chisel their cross in your particular box. Duh.

What we do with power when we get it is one thing – but an election is about winning votes. To flip Mario Cuomo on his head, if Labour want to win, we need to campaign in prose in order to have the slightest hope of governing in poetry.

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See what I did here?

So let’s sum up a bit. The cumulative effect of turnout blaming and media blaming  is that Labour’s path to victory is now reliant on a lumpen mass of weak-minded, easily brainwashed Murdoch/Mail reading dimwits incapable of independent thought who are additionally incapable of getting themselves to a polling booth.
Patronising and insulting to the electorate?
Most definitely.
True?
Thankfully not.
But until we change our attitude about this and concentrate on the non-tribal voting demographic whose allegiances we need to win, then victory will continue to elude us.

6) (Wrings hands) ‘But it’s all bloody personality politics – it should be about the policies!’

Oh FFS.  Of course it’s about personality! And character. Representative party democracy or not – a general election is about electing a Prime Minister. It’s a job interview, and the public will make their own choice about who they think is up to the task. They will use their gut and their life experience to decide this.

They will put competency very high on their list, and vote for someone they may not even like that much if they think they’ll get the job done. Of course policy is important – double duh! – but they’re trusting their lives, their children’s lives, their money, their jobs, their future to the stewardship of the nation’s ultimate line manager. And when was the last time you thought ‘the personal qualities of my line manager is of no consequence to me whatsoever’?

Who do you want driving the car, your lovely but dozy uncle who’s always scraping the verge, turning round to tell you stories of victories past, or your charmless tight-fisted aunt whose eyes never leave the road? You wouldn’t invite her to a party, but you want her wheel. Getting there alive is better than never getting there at all. In the case of May versus Corbyn, Theresa looks like she knows what she’s doing. Jeremy doesn’t.

Uh-uh! Don’t go off on one. I’m not saying that Theresa does know what she’s doing, but I am saying that if you sit, empathetically, in the swing-voter’s back seat then it is easy to see why she would be perceived that way.  Which brings me neatly to….

5) ‘But Theresa May… she’s a bloody robot!’

Oh yes, in electioneering terms, absolutely. This GE is being sung from the Lynton Crosby playbook turned up to eleven – and it’s certainly an eyeball peeling, eardrum shattering sensory assault. This may be hard for some guests of the Marmoset to stomach but David Cameron used to croon the Crosby tunes with a good deal of charm.

No, not him…

Bingcbs

This guy.

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Sorry, you’re going to have to stick with the idea of David Cameron having charm. Remember, winning this election (if that were possible) is about persuading people who found Cameron to be charming – or Nigel Farage to be credible – that they’d rather vote for Jeremy Corbyn this time round. Try to stay focused on that idea.

Now excuse me while I jump back a metaphor. Think of the Lynton Crosby election-winning mechanism as a relentless, piston-thumping engine… In Cameron’s charming kid-driving-glove mitts, it is encased in a shiny chassis, shimmering in the sun as it flashes through a grove of poplars, shock absorbers and silencers rendering its pumping cylinders quiet as a whisper.

Sadly this time round, the charmless aunt has been handed the brutalist stripped down model. Lynton only has a few weeks, so there’s no chassis, no shock absorbers, no silencers… this is a V8 Crosby machine in the grinding raw.

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Theresa May’s oily election machine

Yup. We can see all the working parts. But the point is – the parts are working – the engine driving the May Robot is just as powerful, no matter how much we can smell the oil steaming off the cylinder block.

May’s team know what the selling point is – they’ve done the focus groups… (oooh… did I hear you sneer just then? Behave.) …and consequently they know what their target demographic thinks. Recent polling shows that concern about the outcome of Brexit exceeds concern for the future of the NHS in some surveys. It’s startling, but not surprising. It’s completely rational to be absolutely bloody terrified. I am! If Brexit goes tits up then everything else is fucked. Not only that, but huge swathes of the population – left, right, leave, remain – quite rationally understand that many in the EU are determined to prove that there can be no happy ending for anyone else with ideas about making a run for it.

So there’s one message: May’s a ‘bloody difficult woman’ who’ll fight the UK corner. Strong and stable and all that – and mock though we relentlessly do – May held down the scalp-strewn post of Home Secretary for six years, one of the longest tenures in recent history.

But she just keeps on saying it… because she and Lynton understand that if you’re a non-tribal voter and you care about the economy, you’ll vote for the person who you think can handle Brexit; if you care about immigration, you’ll vote for the person you think can handle Brexit; and if you care about the NHS you’ll vote for the person who you think can handle Brexit.

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Feast your eyes on this Survation Poll from Saturday May 6th 2017

Suddenly, because of Brexit, the Tories have the upper hand on healthcare. Yeah, I know, it turns the stomach and it’s sacrilege to write such words on a left-of-centre website, it’s barely possible to accept, but accept it we must, for it is true.

No… I can feel you REFUSING to believe me.  Look at that poll again – go on, do it!! – and rest assured it won’t be the last to send the same message.

But, you cry, Andrew Marr asked her a dozen questions and she didn’t answer a single one – it was just ‘strong and stable’, ‘strong and stable’ all the way. Duh again! Her refusal to engage with anything else just goes to prove the point. She’s so strong and stable she won’t be drawn on anything and just sticks to her core message. It’s a win-win, almost post-modern, strategy.

Now for a personal window into the domestic life of this Ninja monkey. Mrs Marmoset is worried about me because I keep saying admiring things about Theresa May, but my admiration is the same as one might have for the Alien. Being able to bleed acid blood through five decks of the Nostromo is pretty damned impressive….

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…and you need more than guns if you’re going to bring one of those mothers down.

Which segues nicely into…

4) ‘Well I’m voting for Jeremy because he is the only politician who has integrity, is truly genuine, is a proper socialist, represents true Labour values etc etc etc etc etc etc….’

If you must, but is that seriously the best reason you have?

Ah, I hear you say, with a smug flare of the nostrils, a keen narrowing of the eyes, a minute ago you said that personality was important. Yeah, smartarse, I did. But values on their own, ideals on their own, integrity (aka a bull-headed adherence to one point of view for the whole of your life) and a Santa list of sub-polytechnic-politics-subsidiary slogans does not a personality make. As for ‘genuine’ – what the Johnny-Cash does ‘genuine’ mean anyway? People thought Johnny Cash was genuine when he sang about prison life, but Cash never spent more than a night in the slammer for petty misdemeanours.

The very intelligent exlectorate rightly evaluate personality as Life Experience, Work Experience, The Ability To Get Things Done, and crucially for a Prime Minister, Leadership Skills (that’ll be leadership as in not having everyone in sight resign around you). Any idiot can have ideals – most of us have fabulous values and principles – but it takes real character to make them happen. Thirty-three years on the back benches, voting against your own side, and organising protest rallies hardly counts.

This is why people posting admiringly about Corbyn soldiering on after his front bench resigned and the near unanimous vote of no confidence are wrong – and this is why any other party leader would have resigned at that point. You can’t go into an election once your colleagues have told the rest of the country that you’re crap. You can’t go into an election with a front bench team made up of a talentless rump whose only qualification for office isn’t skill or experience, but that they were the only ones who didn’t vote you down. It’s not even a matter of whether the others were right to resign in the first place. It’s just a cold reality that there’s no way back from that. You’re stuffed – like a pig at a Bullingdon initiation party – and it’s a great oinking signal that you need to exit stage left and let someone lead the party who can command the confidence of a strong team.

That’s my idea of integrity.
And humility.
And personal strength.
And genuinely caring about the values of the Labour Party.

Ploughing on regardless is arrogant, stupid and selfish.

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Jeremy Corbyn – about as genuine as Johnny Cash

3) ‘If you don’t vote for Jeremy then it’s a vote to close the NHS, kill people on benefits, blah blah blah…’

After the local and mayoral elections on May 4th this sort of post was all over social media like Donald Trump’s hands in a cattery…. (….think about it).

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Or this…

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Although this kind of nonsense has already been brilliantly satirised in a painfully true spoof for The Independent – click here – there is more to be said.

The long term consequence of a landslide Tory victory may well be some, if not all, of these terrible things listed in those posts. Of that I have little doubt. However the short term consequence of so characterising any who might disagree with those who like to call themselves the progressive left is not one extra vote for the Labour cause.

Why? Because it’s lazy, reductive, patronising, arrogant, smug and wilfully obstructive to the reality of how elections are won… the last of which I reckon is pretty important if you really want to see a Labour government any time soon.

It starts from a nauseating moral high handedness, the assumption that only a Labour voter truly inhabits the moral high ground. So when wonderfully skilled ex-Coronation Street actors proclaim, sonorous and heartfelt, about Labour being the party that ‘gives a toss’, they have no idea how alienating that is to millions of people. What are they saying? That because someone votes Tory they don’t care about people?

If Labour are ever to win power again we need the votes of millions of folk who have voted Conservative in the past – and you’ve just told them they are moral scum.

This stuff is underpinned by the assumption that any right thinking person will automatically see the notion of Conservatism as toxic. Well, hold the front page. They don’t. They don’t automatically see being conservative as this…

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…and even if they do, they don’t necessarily experience a spasm of involuntary revulsion.  For millions of people around the country being a conservative voter looks just like this:

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It could just as easily be a still from a Ken Loach movie

If we are to win people over – to persuade, to cajole – then we have to banish this morally superior stereotyping to the self righteous trash can of losing strategies where it belongs.

Jeremy Corbyn has even managed to fuck up that sure-fire winner of a slogan: ‘For The Many Not The Few’. Over in Toryland, Theresa May speaks daily (and don’t we know it?) about negotiating a Brexit that works for everybody. She uses the word advisedly.  Everybody.
Everybody.
Now, while you or I may well doubt her sincerity, like it or not, the word ‘everybody’ means just that, and crucially excludes nobody.

Back in Corbynopolis, Our Jezzer has taken a phrase – For The Many, Not The Few – and made it sound hostile and exclusive. In his campaign launch on 9th May, he talked about:

‘…a reckoning for those who thought they could get away with asset stripping our industry, crashing our economy through their greed and ripping off workers and consumers’

It sounds like a declaration of war. It’s an expression of hate. I know many people who would look at me and say: ‘And your problem with that is…?’

While most people want to see a reduction in inequality, they are also aspirational. This kind of oratory is all about ‘us’ and ‘them’ – it reads as aggressive and divisive, and there are plenty of ordinary people wondering whether they might become a bit too ‘them’ to prosper in a Corbyn led society. Of course a Labour government will be founded on redistributive economics, but it needs to be framed in language as inclusive as that used by Theresa May.
Theresa May??? Inclusive????
I can feel the reader balking at everything I write – sputtering in disbelief – but listen, really listen to the difference in the language used. At a recent election appearance in Tynemouth, deep in traditional Labour territory, Theresa May addressed the gathering thus:

‘We respect that parents and grandparents taught their children and grandchildren that Labour was a party that shared their values and stood up for their community. But across the country today, traditional Labour supporters are increasingly looking at what Jeremy Corbyn believes in and are appalled.’

The Tories attack Corbyn personally – hammering away at his personal politics, competence and leadership skills – but you’ll never hear them deriding Labour voters themselves for their values. You’ll never hear them proclaiming that if you’ve voted Labour in the past you’re morally bankrupt and killing disabled people.
Why not?
Because they want our votes.

The language is carefully constructed to LOVE the Labour voter, while driving a wedge between them and their vulnerable leader.  Is it really beyond the wit of the Labour Party and its supporters to something similar and talk respectfully to people who are potential Tory voters but whom they want to persuade? Do we really have to talk like bullies?

And if you still think I’m wrong, scroll up to that opinion poll again. 47% of people think May will create a fairer society than Corbyn’s paltry 37%. Look at it – and learn.

2) ‘Ok, so Corbyn let us down over Brexit – but what else could he have done?’

Well… turning up for the referendum campaign would have been a start. Revisionist Corbynista acolytes blindly refuse to acknowledge any responsibility on their saviour’s behalf but Jeremy’s near sabotage of the Labour Remain campaign is well documented. Remain lost by just over 1.3m votes so all we needed was another 650,000 little pencil crosses and we wouldn’t be in the truly terrifying mess we’re in right now. Whilst the reasons for the Leave victory are many and complex (as grippingly recounted in Tim Shipman’s fantastic book, All Out War) it’s hard to believe that an enthusiastic pro-EU Labour leader, seizing the opportunity and the agenda couldn’t have secured that. For all their own shortcomings, I have absolutely no doubt that either Andy Burnham or Yvette Copper could have got those votes… easily.

What else could Corbyn have done? Well, he could have consulted with his shadow cabinet colleagues on the small matter of Labour Party Policy before coming out at 7.28 am on the morning of 24th June 2016 and calling for Article 50 to be invoked as soon as possible. And people are surprised that most of the shadow cabinet resigned? They are often blamed for their ‘disloyalty’, but hey – pot-calling-the-skillet-le-creuset! – they hardly had a choice in the circumstances.

Oh yeah, and then we get to the bloody ‘will of the people’ and invoking a three line whip for Labour MPs to wave Article 50 through the Commons. Labour policy is something to do with ‘holding the government to account’ but exactly how this is to be achieved now the party has completely rolled over on the issue is quite beyond this tufty little simian.

From up in my tree, savouring my exudates, it is nothing less than the betrayal of a generation.

Corbyn apologists argue that he had no choice. The People Had Decided – ‘The Issue of Brexit Is Settled’ yadda yadda – and crucially Labour is haemorraghing votes in Labour heartlands to UKIP. Well, let’s look under the bonnet of that particular premise.

Offering a convincing counter narrative might have been something worth considering. Just maybe? As the reality of Brexit bears down upon us, the zeitgeist of 2017 is that of a nation – Remain and Leave voters alike – looking down the barrel of a gun.

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Corbyn derides May for taking a confrontational stance with Brussels, but with the barrel right in our faces, which strategy is going to play best with a nervous/terrified electorate?

‘Please can we stay in the single market, and we’re happy to fulfil any conditions to achieve that even if we have no power in the union any more, pretty please…’
or
…whipping out our own weaponry and snarling: ‘Go ahead, Juncker, make my day’. The electorate are feeling that, given the choice, they’d rather die on their feet than live on their knees, which is why Labour-UKIP defectors are now turning to the Conservatives in their extremely crucial hundreds of thousands.

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Bizarrely, Theresa May is capturing the Clint Eastwood vote

Emily Thornberry – Labour’s patroniser-in-chief – pops up on the telly, almost daily, to tell us that Labour has no choice but to look both ways, as they try to satisfy both urban Labour Remainers and Labour heartland Brexiteers but you can see in her eyes – and the doleful look in Keir Starmer’s sad little peepers – that she knows it’s a confusing, untenable and impotent fudge.

So what was the alternative?

The clue’s in that last word – Labour could only seize the agenda by offering an actual alternative. Corbyn’s strategy is to try not to mention the ‘B’ word at all, but there is no way round the cold hard fact that this is the Brexit election. There is absolutely no way Labour can kick Brexit off the top of the agenda. A savvy Labour leader would  have stopped trying to dodge that particular bullet, and rather made a grab for the gun itself.

Yes. It would have been a very high risk strategy, but the opportunity was there for anyone bold enough to take it. If the Tories want a Brexit election then let them have it, but pitch Labour as the party that will withdraw from Article 50 and hold the EU together.

Be bold. Use the election to re-run the referendum.

Labour are barely scraping 30% in the polls.  Why not make a pitch for the 48% who were desperate to Remain in the EU… and rather than accusing Tory or Leave voters of being knuckle-dragging moral scum offer frightened Leave voters a way out of this mess.

Look. I’m not saying I know this would have worked – I have no hard evidence to say that the numbers stack up in the required marginals – and the time when this might have been a realistic option has most definitely passed – many former remainers just want to get on with Brexit – but even now it seems a far stronger, and more responsible pitch than the chicken broth Labour are offering the electorate at the moment. I choose ‘chicken’ as my flavour advisedly.

Yes, the Labour manifesto has a few salty promises, but it still runs scared of the single issue that will decide the outcome.

To go into an election, supporting an ill-defined, half baked Brexit (surely the ultimate ‘Tory-lite’ and I don’t even approve of that phrase), promising to borrow half a trillion plus god knows how much at a time of huge economic uncertainty, dissing anyone with entrepreneurial aspirations, declaring war on a vaguely defined ‘other’… and telling people daily how awful everything is… well, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Theresa May’s poll lead remains stubbornly beyond any previously recorded polling error.

1) ‘We must unite to defeat the Tories at all costs!!’  

Oh yes, this is definitely at number one.

This mantra of the left… the same people who told anyone who doubted the Corbyn project to ‘Fuck off and join the Tories!’.

Well, whaddya know? They did.

But wait… there’s a real election happening and Labour are about to get absolutely hammered so suddenly the devout are realising that far from winning a majority being some sort of bourgeois Blairite peccadillo, without it the country will be well and truly stuffed.

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The founder of Momentum proving the utter stupidity of the hard left

Meanwhile, the ex-journalistic tragedy that is Paul Mason, who, a few months ago could be seen on our TV screens, jabbing his finger, muttering darkly about mass deselections is now twitching on the Newnight panel calling for a progressive alliance.

‘Seriously Paul, go fuck yourself.’ Sorry to swear in such a personally abusive way, but that was what I shouted at my telly the other night. The rank hypocrisy of calling for us all to unite to stop the Tories at all costs. If he and his kind really believed in ‘stopping the Tories at all costs’ then they wouldn’t have voted for a complete numpty to run the party… TWICE!

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These days Paul works hard to keep his jabbing finger under control

Other voices from Planet Corbo simply say ‘hold your nose’, vote for Jeremy. Let’s have a period of purdah where you keep your eviscerating anti-Corbyn blogs to yourself.

Give me a break. It really doesn’t matter what I think, or what I say. I’m just a rare and rather cute little marmoset. It’s neither here nor there whether the lefty chaterati on Facebook or Twitter are critical of the J-Corb – mostly we’re just talking to our own gang anyway. Whether or not different factions of the left think he’s incompetent and a liability – as I do – is irrelevant. That’s not going to affect the result. I’m voting Labour anyway, even if I do think he’s a waste of skin.

The only pertinent issue is whether non partisan, floating voters can be persuaded to trust the guy. They’re not listening to any squabbles we have – nor would the pretence that I, for example, thought for a second Corbyn could make a competent PM convince one floating voter to cast their vote his his way in a marginal. No. They’ll make that decision for themselves. Shutting up about it won’t improve things. We can’t pretend he’s doing a good job when he isn’t, as if somehow if we all close our eyes the very obvious shortfalls of him and his so-called team will go away. They won’t. The real problem isn’t me being rude on Facebook or this blog – that’s of no importance whatsoever – but the indifference of the voting public to someone they recognise as neither worth their vote, nor a passing thought.

As my wonderful Sheffield mother-in-law is wont to say: ‘Jeremy Corbyn? He’s got nothing about him.’

If we want the result to be not quite as bad as the polls suggest then we really need to tackle the strategy – not for getting pissed-off Labour centrists on board – but all the other people who are needed to make this thing slightly less of the car crash it’s promising to be.

***

If I sound angry and contemptuous – it’s because I am. I’m frightened as well. Really frightened – more so than any time in my life.

And I do lay what’s happening – from Brexit to the upcoming electoral catastrophe – firmly at the door of the persistent Corbyn believer. Je most definitely accuse.

The point blank refusal to acknowledge an overwhelming accumulation of evidence – which has far exceeded the Marmoset’s worst expectations – puts them in the same category as flat-earthers, homeopaths and creationists – and if I have no respect for those people, then I certainly can’t be respectful of evidence-denying Corbyn believers.

Faith over empiricism. No thanks.

As Michael Heseltine famously said: ‘Labour will win again, when it wants to win’. And that will be when we remember that being in power is the primary objective of Labour as a political party, and that electioneering IS an exact science.

Empiricism over faith. Always.

As for the Marmoset’s bottom ten desperate political clichés… to be fair, most of them stem from people’s desperation, but that makes them no less frustrating.

We need to stop thinking so simplistically. We need to get smart. We need to win again.

***

Of course, at the time of writing there are four whole weeks until polling day, during which time Theresa May could be caught doing something unspeakable to a kitten – or to National Treasure Alan Bennet with a slice of Battenberg – or both, at the same time, and on live TV..!

In which case, all bets are off, and you can scratch all of the above.

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The Marmoset scratching all of the above.

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If You Don’t Like This Film You Are Officially a Bastard

08 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by Martin Jameson in Film, Film Criticism, Free Speech, Ken Loach, Manchester Home, Writing

≈ 8 Comments

I have something to tell you.

(Shuffles nervously… looks at the floor)

The thing is…

How can I put this?

Oh for God’s sake, I’m just going to come out and say it!!!

“I am the NinjaMarmoset and I don’t like I, Daniel Blake.”

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I love Dave Johns. He did a gig at the Heatons Comedy Club and was bloody hilarious.

I actually declared this out loud in a social setting the other night and was greeted with looks of utter horror – jaws dropped, visibly, in front of me – as if I’d publicly stoved in the head of kitten with a paperweight fashioned into the shape of ex work and pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith.

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It’s not hard to imagine IDS as a paperweight, or even a snow globe. I’m sure I don’t need to post a picture of a kitten.

‘But these people have never been given a voice before!!’ one complainant wailed, eyes wide, starting to well with anger and distress. ‘And… I know lots of social workers – I’ve got social workers in my family!! – and it’s TRUE!’

As I started to explain where I was coming from, choosing to bypass the largely irrelevant detail that I’m actually married to a social worker, they stormed off in disgust. And the following day, they had wielded that most vicious of modern punishments… they blocked me from their Facebook page!!!! Not just unfriended me, mind, but blocked me altogether. Wow. They were REALLY angry. It’s a dagger through my heart, I tell you!!!

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Everything has added weight when translated into French

Yes, yes, I know, the film has won the Palme D’Or at the world’s most prestigious film festival; yes, I know it has received unanimous four and five star reviews, hailed as a ‘battle cry for the dispossessed’ by The Guardian; and yes, I know the only people to publicly criticise it are bile filled right wing poverty deniers such as the objectionable Toby Young – or government ministers who haven’t actually seen the movie.

Sorry. I still really dislike it, and, uncharacteristically, I was intending to keep this to myself. After we came out of the movie, I quipped to my companion: ‘There’s no way I’m posting anything about it on Facebook – I’ll be lynched!’ 

But the mere fact I was even saying this – and that my flip comment came true (if you count being blocked from Facebook as the modern equivalent of lynching) – suggests that there are some bloody innards here that are worth a poke around amongst.

There’s a reason you don’t see anybody on social media left of, say, Ken Clarke, voicing criticism of this film because, basically, if you don’t like I, Daniel Blake then you are officially a bastard.

Or I’m the only (left of centre) person in the world who doesn’t like it. That’s possible, I suppose.

What the-Daniel-Blake is going on here?

Let’s start with the film itself:

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

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I’m not messing around!! Here be spoilers.

Daniel Blake’s a Geordie joiner who’s had a major heart attack. His doctors say he is too ill to work, but he is turned down for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and declared fit by the privately run Work Capability Assessment ‘decision maker’. The movie recounts Daniel’s attempts to get the ruling overturned, and his descent into abject poverty. Along the way he meets single mum Katie and her two children Dylan and Daisy. She’s had all sorts of terrible shit happen to her, and starves herself to feed her kids. She dreams of going to college, but ends up working as a prostitute. Daniel becomes a surrogate father and grandfather to her family, and she helps him when he finally gets his appeal for ESA. On the day of the hearing which intends to prove that he really does have a terrible heart condition…

…well if you can’t guess what happens in the toilets just before he’s about to speak then clearly you have never been to the cinema before.

I am fully aware that everything depicted in this film happens on a regular basis to people all round the country. The degrading Kafkaesque insanities of living in poverty and the benefits system are rehearsed many times every day, as they have been for decades.

They are part of my DNA.

One of my earliest memories is the bailiff coming to call when I was four years old. Apparently he told my stepmother (an out-of-work social worker, as it happens) that we didn’t have anything worth taking apart from the radiogram (here’s a link for younger readers)…

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Basically the iPod of the 1960s

…but as we didn’t have any electricity at the time, the loss of it wasn’t the greatest of tragedies. Trying to feed the family on a single bag of potatoes for a week was far more distressing for her. Later we had the gas disconnected, and our phone too. In those days there were no pay-as-you-go inclusive-minutes mobiles, such as are used by the characters in I, Daniel Blake. After narrowly avoiding eviction a few years after that, things did get a lot better, and apart from a year or two (on and off) on the dole in my early twenties (even in the rosy 1980s signing on could be a pretty grim experience) I have led a comfortable life.

But the visceral reality of having nothing – the fear of it – the shame of it – never leaves you.

So I should love I, Daniel Blake, right?

Well, no. I don’t go to the cinema to see things because they are ‘real’. Or because they are a statement of something that is ‘factually true’. That’s not drama. If I want facts, or an exposé, I can watch an episode of Dispatches or Panorama or read an article in The Guardian or The Canary (NB One of the outlets listed in that sentence is not actually somewhere that deals in factual journalism and was included for purely humorous purposes). I already know what’s going on, as did – I would posit – every liberally minded middle class film enthusiast in Screen 1 of Manchester’s Home, the independent cinema where I watched the film. Toby Young may not believe the plot of Daniel Blake, but I would be amazed if a single person came out of that screening saying; ‘We blow me down with a feather, I had no idea!’

A lot of the audience were in tears, so the visceral power of the film couldn’t be denied (except to me, for whom the visceral power of actually having nothing is still more potent). So what was my problem? Hard hearted bastard? Or is it a ‘writer’ thing? It’s my job and I’m applying professional standards to a work of political cinema whose qualities go beyond the normal tenets of dramatic film making…?

If I were doing a blind assessment of this script (as my work often demands of me), I would doubtless admire its intent but I would be pretty forthright about its technical failings.

The story is clunkingly linear and schematic – reliant on acres of spoon fed, off-screen, uncontested back story (clearly no one is interested in the concept of the unreliable narrator in this movie). Lovely, lovable people are brutalised by nasty jobsworths working for the state machine. The characters – good and bad – are two dimensional. They have no inner contradictions, no complexity. Both Daniel and Katie are flawless salt-of-the-earth types. Daniel is a martyr in the great Christian tradition – a saint in fact – more than a saint! He’s a carpenter (a bit like… hmmm… let me think); he can conjure useful things from nothing – bookcases, food, heat from flowerpots and bubblewrap…  (…but sadly not wine, as he’s teetotal); at one point he actually cures a small boy of ADHD (it’s like… its like… it’s like… a miracle!); he befriends a prostitute (see where I’m going with this?); and then dies for all our sins at the end (‘Tonight Matthew I shall be Jesus Christ Himself!’).

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I, Jesus Christ

A two dimensional cipher – and in Blake’s case, entirely passive. His only transgression throughout the movie is a little bit of illegal graffiti. When I was on the dole I found ‘ways’ to subsidise my income. Everybody did – and they still do. The fact that we had to is no less politically significant than what happens to the eponymous victim of Laverty’s screenplay.

Presumably this is the point – these are ‘blameless’ good people beaten to a pulp by the system. Even if you play by the rules you will be destroyed, because the rules are designed to destroy you. We are left feeling outraged, a little bit guilty… but ultimately virtuous, because we have shared Daniel’s pain.

But passivity is not dramatic. Watching a puppy being strangled for two hours might be grimly distressing, but without even a moment where the puppy turns to snap at its attacker, what we are witnessing is a ritual sacrifice… not a story, not a drama.

I’ve always been allergic to didacticism and polemicism – and I say that having contributed to quite a bit of it as a young actor, deviser, director etc in the 1980s. My hackles rise the second I sense I’m being ‘told’ what to think – and boy oh boy does IDB tell us what to think. It pins us back in our seats, puts its moralistic hand around our collective throats and leaves us no option whatsoever to think for ourselves… right to the final speech – the eulogy at Blake’s funeral – Loach and Laverty hammering us over the head with their message. There is only one conclusion to be drawn from this film, resistance is futile.

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How the Marmoset felt at the end of I, Daniel Blake

I find it manipulative – patronising – tedious – suffocating – a form of political dumbing down. And when voicing any kind of dissent becomes a pariah-inducing social gaffe, then it becomes a form of bullying.

Drama isn’t there to ‘tell us’ stuff. Drama exists to enlighten, to enrich our lives by using the contradictions and conflicts of character and story to illuminate the world around us. Not to show us facts – but to throw light from surprising angles on what reality actually means, in all its messy ambivalent glory. It’s the difference between something being ‘truthful’ and simply ‘true’. It’s about asking questions, not answering them.

Shakespeare wrote: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, and Hamlet remains a great play because it leaves the audience to wrestle with the answer – with the million imponderables it poses.

Of course, I’m comparing Apples and PCs here. Hamlet isn’t a polemic, and I, Daniel Blake unashamedly is. It’s in the great tradition of political, campaigning cinema (NB to my horrified Facebook blocker, should you ever read this, there have been hundreds of films giving voice to the lives of the dispossessed, you just haven’t seen them). And, fair enough, just because this particular marmoset goes all ninja about it, it doesn’t render the movie somehow invalid. That’s just a matter of taste, isn’t it?

Well, let’s explore the polemic – Daniel as martyr to the wilful destruction of the welfare state – as a ‘battle cry for the dispossessed’ – who can argue with it? And if it ‘converts’ a single callous heart to the cause of compassionate welfare provision then surely that trumps all artistic criticism – just as Cathy Come Home was integral to the foundation of the charity, Shelter in the 1960s and Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough TV drama brought the crimes and injustice surrounding that disaster into the public consciousness in the 1990s.

Actually yes, probably, that is true, but I’m still fascinated as to exactly how IDB achieves its goal.

So… there I am, I’m watching the movie… but something is knocking at the back door of my political consciousness, and it’s really pissing me off. I ignore it, content that whilst the movie may not be to my taste, clearly it is an important event for a lot of people.

Then, hours later, in the middle of the night, I slip into my dressing gown, climb down the stairs of my inner contrarian and open the back door, and who should be on my back step, shivering in the rain, firmly dumped there by Ken Loach and Paul Laverty, but… Tiny Tim.

Yes! Seriously. It was him…

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Tiny Tim – 1960s activist, ukulele player and falsetto singer.

No!! Not him!! This guy!!

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Tiny Tim – blameless Dickensian poverty icon!

Sorry.

Yes! That’s what I don’t like about the polemicism of I, Daniel Blake – it’s dependant on a quasi Victorian – and arguably reactionary – notion of ‘the deserving poor’.

Who, reading this, doesn’t find their teeth set on edge when politicians start intoning about ‘doing their best for hard working families’? Why? Because of course everyone wants to help ‘hard working families’. It’s a meaningless thing to say. The test of a truly compassionate society is how we deal with ‘slightly indolent families’ – or ‘downright lazy families’ or ‘dangerous anti-social families’ who have gone completely off the rails.

What audience member could ever begrudge Daniel Blake his ESA benefit? He’s worked all his life. He’s paid his dues. He’s cared for his dying wife. He cures the sick. He deserves every penny. He’s the epitome of the deserving poor. But getting angry at Daniel’s injustice isn’t really what this country has to wrestle with right now. What if Daniel didn’t ‘deserve’ it?

Let’s imagine The Marmoset had written I, Daniel Blake (indulge me!).

Daniel’s a joiner – a competent, if mediocre joiner – who regularly knocks stuff off from his building site – and does cash-in-hand jobs on the side to avoid – no, evade – a bit of tax. He’s got an invalid wife and caring for her doesn’t come cheap. Like 49.3% of his fellow Newcastle citizens he votes for Brexit on June 23rd largely because he sees his mates priced out of jobs by cheap EU labour, and he’s particularly incensed when he learns that the Slovakian family in the flat next door are claiming benefits. Sitting in our lovely indy cinema drinking craft beer from plastic cups, he makes us uncomfortable, but we forgive him, because his wife is dying.

And then, bloody hell, she actually turns up her toes. Daniel’s grief-stricken – and he loses whatever meagre allowances were coming his way as his wife’s carer. He is hit by the bedroom tax. He has a heart attack. He can’t work, but is ruled capable and has to go through a lengthy and Kafkaesque process to appeal it. He is so angry and humiliated that he takes out his frustration on the Slovakian family who he knows are collecting benefits seemingly without hindrance.

Wow… now we’re feeling REALLY uncomfortable. This appeals process sure is cruel and dehumanising, but perhaps Daniel deserves it!

So my goal as a writer – wanting to interrogate the subject thoroughly and challenge my very intelligent audience – is to take Daniel on the most difficult journey I can throw at him. Everyone is angry when the ‘saintly’ Daniel Blake of Loach’s film is humiliated and dehumanised but I want to make the audience equally angry at the humiliation and dehumanisation of tax-dodging, Brexit voting, marginally racist Daniel Blake…

…because the core of a civilised welfare state is that benefits are provided according to need, not because we deem a fictional character morally worthy.

But if we are going to use fiction to throw light on a difficult subject, and if we are truly compassionate, then the humiliation of ‘bad’ Daniel must be no less wrong that that of ‘good’ Daniel… and to make the story narratively satisfying, Daniel can learn this too. He realises – just in time – that his anger at his neighbours is nothing to do with them, per se. They have been set at each other’s throats by the failings in the system, and by the inequalities in the macro-economics that drove them here in the first place. Daniel and his neighbours have more in common than they ever realised. If they understand this in time, the film is uplifting and feel-good. If Daniel realises this too late, then it’s grim social realism and we have to have another very expensive craft beer in the bar before we go home and watch something on Netflix.

The alternative – the one we see on screen now – is lazy. It’s lazy and simplistic, and it allows – encourages – the audience to be lazy and simplistic too.

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I’m about to make a highly ironic comment

Perhaps that’s why the film, as it stands, is more commercially successful than the marmoset’s version would ever be.

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The last sentence was layered with multiple ironies, just in case you didn’t notice

Well… perhaps that’s unfair.  As I said earlier, perhaps that’s the point.

Perhaps there’s a reason that Loach (who has directed a few nuanced masterpieces in his time – Kes being one of them) has opted for the melodrama of Victorian philanthropic guilt as his chosen dramatic form this time. Perhaps he and Laverty believe that the times are so Victorian, the audience must be spoken to as Victorians.

On the one hand, I hope that’s true, because at least it makes some kind of sense, and I can happily shut up moaning about it; on the other, I sense it isn’t, and a great film maker has fallen into a depressing and reductive trope which paralyses the debate by reducing the issue of welfare to simplistic, immutable and ultimately sentimental moral absolutes.

I, Tiny Tim and all that.

And on the subject of Tiny Tim, if you’ve never heard the guy – or if you remember him fondly… have a click on this.

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Aimless or Neo-Totalitarian? The Empty Persecution of Laura Kuenssberg

12 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Martin Jameson in Jeremy Corbyn, Journalism, Labour Party, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

38 Degrees, BBC, Daily Politics, David Babbs, Laura Kuenssberg

So… 38 Degrees have dropped their petition to have BBC Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, sacked for alleged bias against Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

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The petition kept popping up on my Facebook feed – often posted by people I consider to be friends, and, just as often, accompanied by offensive and indirectly sexist comments. I didn’t just disagree – as a writer, and occasional journalist myself – I was viscerally alarmed.

I complained three times to 38 Degress about the petition, but despite the pledges on their feedback pages, never received any kind of acknowledgement or reply.

I argued that it brought the campaigning organisation into disrepute. The sexism and misogyny was indeed a primary issue, but sadly neither David Babbs – nor the short sighted and/or neo-totalitarian types who signed this thing – understand the fundamental problem with targeting a specific journalist – regardless of gender. Personally – speaking as someone who follows unhealthy amounts of political journalism – she doesn’t appear to be in any way biased. She’s a journalist equally likely to report on splits in the Tory party (as she has done many, MANY times; there is far more coverage of right wing splits in relation to the EU referendum at the moment in the UK), the Lib-Dems, UKIP etc as she would with the very real splits in the Labour party. She’s a political editor – it’s her job to report this stuff, the problem won’t go away if Laura Kuenssberg doesn’t mention it. Not when senior party members are battling it out on Twitter.

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The Labour Party hardly needs Laura Kuenssberg to advertise their splits…

But this isn’t the point.

If someone watching a BBC News item is unhappy with with the way something is reported, then the thing to do is to take it up with BBC News, and question editorial policy overall (by the way, they will reply to you). That’s perfectly fine, and the right of the UK license fee payer. Indeed that kind of public accountability is fundamental to the way the BBC works. You certainly don’t have that kind of direct accountability in most other areas of journalism.

BUT – and it’s a massive swollen arse of a ‘but(t)’ – targeting individual journalists is a completely different matter.

Think about it – especially anyone reading this blog who signed this thing – what is the BBC supposed to do? Let’s just imagine that 38 Degrees had submitted this petition. How would you expect the BBC to react?

Treat it with the contempt it deserves, hopefully. They would have to.

Because obviously if the BBC did start sacking journalists because of public pressure exerted by specific interest groups, what message would that send?

The reason totalitarian regimes censor, sack, blacklist, imprison – or even execute – individual journalists who report or say things they don’t like, is to send a message to every other journalist that the reporting they do must fit a pre-determined political agenda – otherwise they’ll be out of a job. It’s a form of intimidation and bullying from which anyone who believes in free speech – and indeed, a fair and just society – should absolutely disassociate themselves.

Journalists-gagged

Are these the values of the new activist left? I sincerely hope not.

But there’s something else going on here. For most of my lifetime the most vociferous braying – accusing the BBC of bias – has come from the right of British politics, insistent that the BBC is staffed by an army of vegetarian, politically correct pinkos (amongst which I count myself – although I’m not a vegetarian).

Ironically, as someone who has spent much of his professional career working in a range of capacities for the organisation, there is actually some truth in this – ! – although BBC journalists and other creatives take a lot of pride in their ability to stick rigorously to the corporation’s much vaunted principles of impartiality. Perhaps too much sometimes. When I first worked for the BBC, I spent a day observing at the World Service and was moved to tears by the dedication of the journalists there to report fairly on regimes who had certainly not treated them fairly before they had come to the UK. The BBC doesn’t always get it right, but there’s something infectious and almost obsessional about those values within the organisation, certainly, as I have experienced it.

But these days, the main chorus of disapproval comes from certain elements within the Corbyn left – not Corbyn himself, I hasten to add.

So what’s this about?  Is there something just plain nasty lurking here? Well… there may be in places – there’s definitely a few old Trots and Militant types who have hitched themselves to the Corbyn bandwagon – but I genuinely don’t think that’s the issue.

I think this is about a lack of purpose at the heart of the Corbyn project. It’s a movement that has lost its way to such a degree that it feels it can be shaken off course by a BBC journalist reporting on internal party splits. Surely if Corbyn had anything about him, he would be leading the agenda, and a few negative stories would be neither here, nor indeed, there. Cameron is repeatedly ridiculed by factions on the left and right, and I would argue that one reason he is such a canny survivor – and indeed successful – as a politician is because he refuses to be rattled by such stuff. Love him, hate him – he’s ‘the guy’ and he’s getting on with it. Plus he’s very good at laughing at himself.

Jeremy Corbyn has an oft stated objective of motivating an unseen army of people who currently don’t vote. So far, so noble. But check out what happened yesterday (Wednesday 11th May 2016) at Prime Minister’s Questions. He led on two questions about the ‘Workers Posted Directive’.

No, I had no idea what that meant either.

Neither did Andrew Neil nor Jo Coburn, on the BBC’s Daily Politics, who had to Google it live on air.

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Jo Coburn & Andrew Neil as bemused as ‘Martin from Stockport’

Kuenssberg to her credit did actually know something about it – and thought it was a decent – if obscure – issue to raise. Jo Coburn then said they were getting lots of texts and tweets expressing similar confusion, and read out an email from ‘Martin in Stockport’ declaring that he ‘was a political junkie but still had no idea what the Labour Leader was talking about’. Yup folks, that was me.

That detail aside, it’s a visceral demonstration of how lost Corbyn is.

When people say we have to stop carping and get behind the Labour Leadership – I ask: ‘Get behind what?’  Corbyn’s stinging campaign to support the Workers Posted Directive – which may well be important, but apparently affects 0.7% of EU workers?  Seriously?  Even after Andrew Neil explained it I still didn’t understand it. Are we supposed to believe that the serried ranks of the disenfranchised will be stirred to the barricades by Jezza’s uncompromising stance on the issue?

‘What do we want???’
‘The Workers Posted Directive!!’
‘When do we want it???’
‘Back-dated to April 1st!!!’

But worse was to come. In the same PMQs, after wishing David Attenborough a happy birthday, Corbyn omitted to congratulate Sadiq Khan for his amazing (centrist?) victory in London last week – leaving a back bencher (whose name I can’t remember), Tim Fallon (leader of the Liberal Democrats) and indeed David Cameron himself to hand out the plaudits to Khan.

Here was a golden opportunity to big-up the broad Labour tent and absolutely slam Cameron for backing Zac Goldsmith’s dog whistle racism last week. But for some reason, Corbyn opted to go big on the Workers Posted Directive… and snub his new, extremely popular Labour mayor on the week’s most high profile platform for any leader of the opposition.

This wasn’t just missing an open goal…. this was missing an open goal when the other team had pissed off to the pub and left the field completely undefended.

If you are reading this – and you are someone who believes passionately in a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn – then perhaps concentrate on developing that message into something coherent around which we can all coalesce. The electorate don’t owe him their support. And I, as a (more or less) lifelong Labour member don’t owe Jezza my support. Wasting your energy trying to get a female journalist sacked is not only reactionary in the extreme – but it demonstrates that there isn’t enough going on at the heart of the project. If Corbyn was truly inspirational, then you wouldn’t care what Laura Kuenssberg said. You’d be selling his message… whatever that is. I mean, I really don’t know any more.

Winners  don’t complain about the opposition, or the crowd, or, indeed, the commentators. They win because they are good at what they do, and they rise above any obstacles put in their way.

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The Marmoset Picks The Nits Out Of Taxation

08 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by Martin Jameson in Economics, Emmerdale, Politics, Taxation, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

David Cameron, Ian Cameron, Moral Self-Righteousness, Starbucks, Tax Avoidance

WARNING!  SOME OF THE FOLLOWING IS ABOUT TAX LAW!!!
PS THERE AREN’T MANY JOKES

Some years ago, when I was pulling in a more than decent six figure whack from my travails in the TV writing industry, my lovely accountant (you know who you are!) lobbied me pretty intensively with regard to ‘incorporating’ myself. For those unfamiliar with this concept – essentially it meant turning myself into a company – Martin Jameson Ltd – subject to beneficial rates of corporation tax – and then paying myself from the dividends, thereby reducing my tax liability by thousands of pounds every year.

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All this from just a few episodes of Emmerdale Farm!!

This was a completely legal form of tax avoidance – although I think the tax benefits have shifted a bit these days – and a commonplace amongst many media professionals. It went on all the time and no one thought much about it.

Well I thought about it – very seriously – but on balance I decided that a) it sounded like an awful lot of hassle (which would have been one reason my lovely accountant was keen as he would ‘take care of it’… for a very competitive fee of course) and b) as a democratic socialist earning a decent fist, I actually wanted to pay my fair share of tax from which my health care, kids’ education, state infrastructure etc was paid. So far, so virtuous.

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This is what I looked like when I decided not to incorporate

Many of my contemporaries – including several who would regularly tout their working class lefty credentials – chose to exploit this completely legal method of reducing their personal tax liability.

Of course all self employed media hobbits exploit a well established system of tax avoidance.  We run our own businesses, work from home, provide all our own working materials, pay for all our own research, buy our own heel balm and hairy foot coiffure etc etc… and so quite reasonably the costs of these items are not subject to tax at whatever is our highest rate. The list of things we can legitimately claim for is decided upon and constantly reviewed by the bods at HMRC.

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Hobbits can legitimately claim for foot care products

But tax avoidance it most definitely is – as opposed to tax evasion, which is illegal – and until a couple of years ago no one batted an eyelid. But now multi-nationals are keeping their patents off shore and their UK franchises pay royalties to those ‘parent’ companies equal to any taxable profits here where they make their cash – and hospitals are starved of it. And Prime Ministers’ fathers set up – completely legal – offshore funds, and offer their kids a chunk, who profit from the tax free status, and everyone goes MEME crazy on Facebook.

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So is one form of tax avoidance ‘better’ than another – more, or less, morally acceptable?

Going back to the arcane tediosity of being a self employed scribbler, did I, having made my goody-two-shoes decision to pay self employed income tax as per normal, stand sanctimoniously in judgement of my colleagues who chose a less taxing route?

No. Absolutely not. It was completely legal and a matter of personal choice. Pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and if Caesar says incorporating is ok, then clearly Caesar has factored that in. Caesar can make that illegal if he wants to. However, interestingly, in recent years, anyone openly declaring their left wing credentials is a lot more wary about going down the incorporation path. It’s starting to be seen as a bit iffy.

So what about the other more aggressive forms of tax avoidance? Are they ‘worse’?

Well, the argument runs that the problem with the ‘Starbucks’ strategy, or the offshore tax haven strategy is that, although they are legal, they are essentially inequitable. You can only do these things if you have shed loads of dosh in the first place – so therefore the law is structured so that the very wealthy have opportunities to reduce their tax liability that aren’t available to the rest of us on more meagre incomes – even the hobbits.

So is it right to lambast those wealthy types for their moral vacuity, hypocrisy, greed etc for exploiting these tax loopholes? Should David Cameron be drummed out of office for some shares in his Dad’s company he owned ten years ago?

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‘Thanks for the money, Dad’ – ‘Keep it under your Panama hat, son’

Of course, everyone’s entitled to an opinion, and it’s certainly emblematic of the way that inequality is written into the statutes of our society at a very deep level, but I can’t help thinking that the individuals aren’t really the issue.

This is about law in a democratic society.

I’ve attempted, here, to find some kind of dividing line to delineate where I think tax avoidance moves from the sensible to the poisonously inequitable – but I’ve certainly met people who are astonished, even outraged that I can set a percentage of my telephone costs off against tax, or travel for work purposes, or paper, or books and DVDs I use in my research, theatre and cinema trips, many other things…  Depending on your starting point, everybody’s bottom line in the tax-sand is different.

Which is why we have a democracy, and we vote in a government, and we accept that the majority wins, whether we agree with them or not, and they get to make the laws for the time they are in office. Democracy isn’t about taking EVERYONE’s opinions into account. That’s chaos. We do the voting thing precisely to avoid that chaos.

So if we don’t like the way Starbucks behaves, or the Ian Camerons of this world, then, sure, have a pop, but the only practical, useful, meaningful thing is to lobby – in order actually DO something about what happens next – to change the law itself.

The problem with throwing mud at someone for exploiting the law as it stands, or stood in the past, is that then we are asking individuals, or companies, to make a subjective decision about what tax they should pay, as if there’s a sort of instinctive right and wrong about this stuff. It’s predicated on the idea that there is some kind of natural ‘common sense’, a moral law, that everyone’s agreed upon.

There isn’t, and they aren’t. We aren’t!

And then it all gets mixed up with the background radiation that is social media’s distaste for anyone who has any cash at all – ! – unless, of course, it’s someone they like, such as a footballer or an artistic creative. But that’s a whole other blog…

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The German cartoonist George Grosz would have flourished in the age of social media!

It’s so very easy to be morally self-righteous, but moral self-righteousness is fundamentally subjective, so in the end we just have to decide as a country what we want to do and legislate for it – and not be surprised when individuals or companies work within the laws our democracy provides for them.

Although, of course some of us do make that subjective choice…

Excuse me while I go and polish my halo.

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My TV Chef Bum Grope Horror

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Martin Jameson in Sexual Politics, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Holby City, Jimmy Savile, Max Clifford, Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, TV Chefs

Back in the heady pre-austerity days of 2006, when the BBC was still flashing the cash and could throw a party and actually mean it, I was downing the canapés by the dozen (writers always eat as much food as they can, especially if it’s free) at a swanky ‘BBC Talent’ party somewhere only moderately posh in London.  Over there was George Alagiah; over there was Graham Norton, chatting to him animatedly was Simon Amstell; Michael Buerke was looking a little miserable….  And isn’t that Michael Portillo in the corner?  Gosh, his head seems disproportionately large in relation to the rest of his body.  Should I go over and say that I don’t dislike him half as much as I did when he was in office?  Maybe not.  Instead, I find myself talking inanely about my daughter’s dance classes to Anton du Beke and Arlene Phillips.  They do a very good job of looking vaguely interested.

bum gropeI could go on.  This was name-drop central.  A strange out-of-body experience where anyone and everyone from BBC Television was out guzzling and chomping their way through your precious license fee.  If you’re a writer, you are essentially anonymous, and so although you have earned your right to be there, it’s not quite on an equal footing.  You recognise pretty much everyone in the room – you feel like you know them personally, they are so familiar to you – but no one has a clue who you are.  It’s a slightly surreal feeling of privileged powerlessness.

And then it happened.  I’m chatting to one of the script editors from Holby City, when I feel a strong hand enclose itself around my right buttock, and give it a firm squeeze, one of the fingers most definitely engaging with the central crevice.  Sorry.  Too much information.

I flip around, startled, and find myself looking into the beaming face of an extremely well known TV Chef.  He grins at me, enjoying my moment of surprise, his eyes twinkling, and says: ‘Just off to the loo’.  He winks, and trots away.

Was that…?   Yes it was.

Ok.  So, obviously I knew who this guy was, but I had never met him before, I certainly hadn’t been talking to him, and had only cursorily noticed his presence earlier in the evening. The point I’m making is that this bit of hand-to-bum engagement came totally out of the blue.  No flirting, no sexy come-ons across the vol-au-vents.  Needless to say, I didn’t follow him to the loo, and had no further contact with him all evening.  And, to be honest, I thought it was extremely funny.  FFS I was 46!  I texted and emailed my friends about it.  I have dined out on the story.  My Best Man quoted the tale at my wedding last year.  Everyone laughed.

And look, I really, REALLY, don’t want to get po-faced about it.  But recent events – Savile, Harris, Clifford, Stuart Hall – have made me re-evaluate it, just a bit.

Of course, I’m not traumatised by what happened one tiny bit.  I genuinely thought it was extremely amusing. But there was something else going on.

Why did this man think it was ok to grope a complete stranger’s bum in such a very public place?  Ok, so I’m 46 at the time, and this guy has no power over me, so there’s no threat as far as I’m concerned, but then on reflection… he doesn’t know that.  If I’d been a dyed-in-the-wool homophobe, I could have turned around and hit him.  I could have been a younger, more vulnerable BBC employee and felt incredibly compromised.  What is it that gives him the sense that he can do this?  Well, presumably he’d had a few to drink, but it’s more than that.

He’s famous, and I’m not.  Even if I was inclined to grope mens’ bums at BBC Talent fests, there is absolutely no way I could randomly hook on to a well known celebrity’s arse in full view of everyone in the room, while they are talking to someone in what is, at least partly, a professional context.  If I had, I would probably have been summarily ejected from the venue.   This does say something about the ‘power’ of celebrity.  I cringe at that phrase, but I can’t see a way round it.  He knows I’m not going to make a fuss.  It’s a media ‘do’ so I’m certainly not going to be openly homophobic!

And interestingly, although women experience such gropings as commonplace (although hopefully less so these days) I doubt very much whether any man would have groped a woman in that way at that particular industry function.

I’m not going to name this person, because I don’t want to cause any unnecessary embarrassment to a man I have no other knowledge of.  I have no gripe with him.  Like I say, it was trivial and did me no harm.

But even there…  if, in the future, something more serious were to be associated with this individual (and I’m definitely not saying it will be) would I become complicit in not having done something to check potentially predatory behaviour?

I want the world to be fun.  I don’t want to live in a world where we’re afraid to touch each other. I don’t mind being groped by the occasional TV Chef. But the line between fun and friendliness – and something darker that uses power for self gratification – is blurry.

Normally I end these blogs with some kind of pithy conclusion, but in this instance I’m floored. I suppose the answer is quite boring and dull.  It’s about respect.  Simple as that.  The problem is I don’t want the world to be boring and dull.

So we’ll all have to  work hard at being mischievous and cheeky, and occasionally flirty – but in a respectful way.

How’s that for a punchline?

 

 

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