Jan 15 2009
A Plethora of Comment
Having been doing the family thing this week, I have had to bite my tongue and save up my comments till now. Here goes, let’s let rip;
Politics; New Labour announced another Tory policy of guaranteeing loans, though why they are doing this is not clear, especially as the recession is supposedly over and the green roots of recovery have been seen by a New Labour peer?! What a fool (and that was not the first word that sprang to my mind), who should have her peerage removed, she clearly isn’t up to the job of making decisions for the future of the country, for which she was elevated to the House of Lords.
Middle East; there has been a victim of the war who has not yet been mentioned. For the first two and a half weeks of the invasion, a female Israeli Major was on our telly teeling us the Israeli spin. After she named two Hamas militants who she claimed were in the UN school shelled by the Israelis, the army then said that they had NOT intended to shell the school, that NO Hamas militants were firing from within the school, and that they had been attacking near the school, and had accidentally misfired the shell that entered the UN compound. The major had also claimed that Hamas were targetting women and children in Israel, whilst thr PMs spokesman and the army have both stated that Hamas are not targetting anyone, but indiscriminately firing out of date missiles towards Israeli towns. The major has now disappeared, and is clearly facing the blame for Israel losing the war of words with the public and media.
Today, an almost identical shelling of a UN compound has taken place, and again Israel is telling two stories; 1/ We did shell the compound accidentally (though the UN had kept notifying them that their shelling was getting closer and closer to the compound) & 2/ We attacked it on purpose because Hamas were firing rockets from within the compound. Again the same two stories, and again Isreal has shelled a known UN compound, injuring UN staff and, because they used incendaries, destroying UN Aid Relief. Hopefully this repeated anti-UN activity and lies from the military will result in War Crimes being brought against Israeli Generals and Politicians (just as happened to Slobodan Milosevic and his Generals).
Israel sank an American ship during the Arab/Israeli War and yet America did nothing, even though according to the CIA radio observer, the pilots questioned the command to attack because the ship was a ‘friendly’ and, according to American Military survivors, the Israeli navy fired upon their liferafts. American Presidents love reassuring the people that they will always protect their people and troops, yet allowed Israel to get away with this prearranged attack. Israel has ignored International Law with regard to the building of its wall around the West Bank. Israel has now launched several attacks upon the United Nations. Terrorism is acting outside of International Law, and Israel is committing acts of terrorism in Gaza. No peace can possibly be achieved whilst the Palestinian people are shown that they must act within International Law, whilst Israel does not have to. They must be shown that the law applies to all.
BBC Radio7; a digital channel that was established for the spoken word, as opposed to being a music channel, has access to the whole archives of radio programmes from BBC4, the Light Programme and regional BBC radio stations. It focuses on comedy, crime & thrillers, sci-fi and classics. Strangely, like the rest of the BBC, when it comes to classics, they are incredibly ignorant and not at all well read. Guess what they are; yes, Dickens, Bronte & Austen! In fact, their knowledge of the subject is so poor that this week they are having to tell us two Dickens stories each day!!!
What is even more of a condemnation is that they need to repeat every programme that they have at least twice a year. They appear to have only about 5 months of programming. As most of the Crime & Thrillers section comprises only Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple/Hercule Poirot, and that by turning to ITV3 on your tv set you can watch the same stories with Jeremy Brett etc and get the whole story in one sitting, this is quite pointless.
Comedy wise, each episode of classic comedy is played three times a day, and is so dated that at times it can be border racist and sexist. ‘The Goons’ often contains the type of stereotyping and Peter Sellars ‘faux Indian’ accent (among others) that if repeated by a modern broadcaster would result in firings, resignations and apologies that would make the Brand/Ross affair seem small fry. ‘Dad’s Army’ and ‘Hancocks Half Hour’ may contain humour but do not to further opinion of British foreign behaviour. After all, is it any surprise that Germans believe English people can not NOT mention the war, when wartime though post war comedy is seen as standard fayre by the BBC, and not a day goes by without one of the 5 terrestial tv channels showing a second world war movie? It also semmes that only 1 radio comedy was made by the BBC between 1959 and 1980, the amusing Kenneth Horne shows (’Around the Horne’ & ‘Beyond Our Ken’) which include risky and risque ‘gay’ performances despite homosexuality being illegal still at the time they were made - and they have Kenneth Williams in the show!
The more modern comedy offerings are more promising, though some still beg the question ‘who commissioned this b*llocks’. Too little Armando Iannucci and his stable of stars, too much Angus Deayton & Marcus Brigstocke.
What a shame that according to BBC7, the BBC has only produced circa 1,500 hours of worthwhile spoken material during its whole existence!
Modern Comedy Radio Shows; this is a different section, though BBC7 has plenty of this rubbish, and a real bugbear of mine. Don’t get me wrong, I love the modern comedy, I think that we have produced more quality comedy in the last 30 years than any other country in the world. It is just one aspect of the modern comedy radio shows that I hate - the musical interlude. Do not get me wrong, Bill Bailey is magnificent with his music based shows, Victorai Wood wrote some amazingly funny piano tunes to end her shows, and I even used to enjoy Richard Stilgoe at the end of Nationwide, summing up the days news amusingly to tune. I own numerous ‘Bonzo Dog DooDah Band’ LPs, and likewise ‘Half Man, Half Biscuit’, ‘Macc Lads’ and ‘John Shuttleworth’ ones.
The great stand up comedians of each era do not need to take 5 minutes out, having got the crowd laughing, to introduce some fool with a keyboard, who dismays the audience, only for the star to return and try to pick the crowd up again. Peter Kaye does not do this, Steve Coogan never did this, Dave Allen would have baulked at the idea, and Tony Hancock felt he could thirty minutes withhout such rubbish. Unfortunately, almost every Radio Comedy show of the past 30 years seems to have decided that the tried and tested, well proven approach is not for them, and force some musician onto the cast list. Shows such as ‘Punt & Dennis’s ‘It’s been a bad week” suddenly stop, and up steps a music graduate who is not good enough to play with an orchestra, who is such a non-entity personality wise, that no band would want to be on a tour bus with them, and who wouldn’t know satire if it spanked them. Usually, this role is taken by Mitch Benn, whoever he is, though I suspect his father/mother may work for the BBC.
Stop it - comedy is comedy, musical comedy is a great art which must be mastered, but these nobodys who destroy the work of the main artists must go. We are in 2009, not Vauderville.
That’s enough ranting for today. Instead, I shall sit back and think about my Spanish holiday next week. Sun, sand and sangria. Nice.
