Words Dept.

The BBC appears to have spent much of today debunking its own story about the National Bullying Helpline allegedly taking calls from members of Downing Street staff. I listened in amusement at lunchtime as a reporter on Five Live quoted several issues about this charity that were raised last night on Adam Bienkov’s Tory Troll blog, when it really would have made sense for the BBC to highlight these things in its original report, instead of completely ignoring them. The Five Live piece followed John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning, who managed to establish that complaints didn’t actually involve the Prime Minister personally. As such, the relevance of the NBH’s claims to the original story about Gordon Brown’s temper is sort of questionable.

There is a dismal lack of basic journalism at the heart of this story. What happened to the idea of corroborating facts with more than one source? Claims such as those made by the boss of the helpline, Christine Pratt, are unproveable hearsay, while the dubious state of the NBH’s finances, connections to a human resources consultancy business and links to David Cameron and Ann Widdecombe – none of which was mentioned in the BBC’s story – take us into obviously dodgy territory with a possible political smear campaign at its centre. Various bloggers managed to pinpoint these basic problems – why not the BBC?

Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, attempts to justify the BBC’s approach on his blog:

We can’t, of course, verify the truth of her allegations – merely report them and Downing Street’s response to them.

Which may come as a surprise to those old-fashioned folks who believe journalism involves making sure something is true before reporting it. The logical approach would have been to ignore the batty Mrs Pratt on the basis that there is no way of proving whether or not what she is saying is truthful. A proper news story of the sort pedalled by the Sunday newspapers would involve speaking to a whistleblower before going public with this sort of claim. But there isn’t a whistleblower and the motivations of the charity are clearly suspect. Which maybe suggests the story isn’t true.

I’m generally not inclined to attack the BBC. But it should never have treated this story in the way it did. The fact that it has then filled the airwaves today with the sort of basic facts that should have informed its original story – but didn’t – just adds insult to injury.

It all started on Sunday morning, when I began one of my usual rants on Twitter about the terribleness of deathly Tim Lovejoy vehicle Something for the Weekend, which culminated in this tweet:

Unpredictably, this comment led to direct contact from Nicky Campbell and, since I’m not one to pass up the chance of wringing a blog post from the most meagre of material, I shall now analyse his tweets in order to make an assertion about his state of mind, personality, etc.

First contact was established by Nicky in the following tweet:

There are a couple of things to note here, the most obvious of which is Nicky’s use of “lol”. Since he’s a 48-year-old, often quite cantankerous Scotchman, I never thought he’d have used this kind of webspeak, which I tend to associate with floppy-brained twenty-somethings who rely on Facebook for their current affairs intake. I suspect he’s been taught it by a teenage family member. Or maybe he’s secretly a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger. The other thing to notice is that I never used the @NickyAACampbell username, so he must have some kind of alert set up for mentions of his own name. Perhaps all celebrities do this. Or maybe they don’t.

Obviously I wasn’t going to be deterred by Nicky’s lol-ing, so I followed up with another tweet:

On reflection, I can see why it might look as though I was pretty much begging for a follow-up response from the erstwhile Watchdog host, and the big man didn’t disappoint:

Fortunately, this is where the dumb, lolcatty Nicky takes a backseat and the frightening, sarcastic Nicky we all know and love makes a welcome return. Witness the heavy irony apparent in the “hugely relieved and grateful” part, followed by the possibly menacing “nice website” – which suggests he has looked at my website, knows where I (metaphorically) “live” and will be watching me carefully for future signs of insolence. (There is, admittedly, another “lol” in there but we’ll let that pass.) Others have interpreted this second tweet as a piece of reputation management, which is designed to disarm me and make me think he’s a nice guy.

I can’t make my mind up if Nicky Campbell is a nice guy, or if he’s essentially a madman who stays up at night scanning Twitter for signs of anti-Nicky Campbell sentiment. I kind of hope it’s the second one but unfortunately it probably isn’t.

Next Sunday: Watch in astonishment as  Tim Lovejoy launches a foul-mouthed attack against me on live television after I take the piss out of his tight sweater.

It’s transfer deadline day today. So, what better time to note that football journalism is the one area of the profession where it remains possible to make things up completely off the top of your head and still remain in a job even after the 300th time your byline appears on something that’s complete and utter bollocks.

According to the Daily Mail’s Joe Bernstein on Saturday, football fans would today enjoy a “transfer merry-go-round”. Robbie Keane would leave Spurs for Sunderland, Kenwyne Jones would depart Sunderland for Liverpool and Ryan Babel would be sold to Birmingham by Liverpool. Of course, none of this actually happened. A couple of weeks earlier, the same paper had reported that Jones would join Liverpool in time for the game between Liverpool and Spurs on 20 January. Again, total bollocks.

These are just a couple of examples from one newspaper but every day, particularly during the twice yearly transfer windows, the papers are filled with complete and utter claptrap, planted by agents and clubs and seemingly unchecked for even a microgram of credibility. This is particularly the case where big name players are concerned.

In October 2008, the Mirror reported that Fernando Torres had been offered £200,000 a week to move to Manchester City, while the Telegraph printed an immediate denial. A little over a year later in December 2009, the Mail reported that City’s hopes of signing the player had been “dashed”. Yet, just a month later, the People claimed City were lining up a £100m bid for the player this summer. Contradiction spawned from wild stabs in the dark are the hallmarks of football journalism.

The story in the People was bylined Steve Bates. That’ll be the same Steve Bates who reported in November that City would sign Spurs’ David Bentley in the January window, quoting “Eastlands sources”. Strangely, these same sources didn’t bother to mention that manager Mark Hughes would be sacked just three weeks later.

So to help Steve and his compatriots, I present the Words Dept. Football Journalism Bullshit Assistant. Simply print out the list of football-related names and phrases below, cut them out, rearrange them on your desk and a story will miraculously invent itself.

Words Dept. Football Journalism Bullshit Assistant (Patents Pending)

audacious

the San Siro

Vennegoor of Hesselink

smash

Anfield hierarchy

Kenwyne Jones

misfit

wage structure

come-and-get-me plea

Fernando Torres

unsettled

Hertha Berlin

Wayne Rooney

income tax rate

the Nou Camp

Guus Hiddink

Kia Joorobchian

Schalke

Paraguay international

£90 million

£150 million

£250 million

Younes Kaboul

I’m quite impressed by the borderline heretical grumblings over at FUC51. Not because I hate the Smiths, New Order or Joy Division (they’re actually three of my favourite bands) but because I hate the idea of living and working in a supposedly creative city that’s obsessed with a musical movement that ended twenty years ago.

Yes, Tony Wilson was great, Blue Monday is an incredible pop song and that anecdote about the Happy Mondays’ crack-based vacation in Barbados is truly one that unites us as a nation. We get it. We got it some time ago, in fact. But someone really needed to point out that the Peter Hook-backed FAC251 club sounds like a criminally boring money-making, credibility-losing enterprise, while Delphic are an average band whose claim to the title of “the new New Order” smacks of a desperate record company marketing person’s unconvincing hard sell.

As FUC51 puts it:

While slating Liverpool for being a Beatle-museum, Mancs are still pretending it’s 1988. Look around the city and you’re given constant reminders of Factory Records, The Hacienda, The Stone Roses, The Smiths, Acid House, NewOrderJoyDivision and… you get the idea.

Our aim is to act as snipers to this relentless wave of borrowed nostalgia that continues to make stars of Madchester hangers-on and people steeped in yesteryear.

Something went a bit weird when these hangers-on became part of the Manchester establishment. Despite coining the slogan Original Modern, the council and its public sector marketing quangos are obsessed with the myth-making. They recruited Hacienda designer Ben Kelly to design the corporate stand at the MIPIM property fair in the south of France a couple of years ago, at which copies of CDs containing various baggy-era classics were handed out to the greying property developers in beige suits and Ray-Bans who gravitate there each March. The council’s recruitment of Peter Saville as creative consultant at a salary of a hundred and twenty grand a year is also, if we’re being completely honest, a little bit silly.

So down with this sort of thing. Let’s all listen to Autechre.

Hat tip (at risk of turning this blog into a Stockport-based blog love-in) to Marple Leaf for pointing me in its general direction.

There’s been a not wholly positive reaction to Manchester Confidential’s “redesign” today. It looks quite a lot like the old site although it’s somehow more grotesque. It’s cluttered, it’s dominated by an almost misanthropic shade of yellow and looks like it was conceived in about 1999. By a drunk. ManCon has unleashed the dogs of war – or, at least, a couple of bitchy @replies – to anyone who dared to mention it on Twitter.

This coincides with the launch of ManCon’s paywall structure. To read this review of Pizza Express, for example, you now have to pay a minimum of three pounds a month.

This blog was the first to reveal details of ManCon’s “heroes” pricing structure (it really was, honest), which is backed by a cheaper “friends” model. For this, you get access to various stuff including special offers and competitions, as well as restaurant reviews.

I’ve nothing against paywalls in principle. My view is that the marketplace will decide whether you can make money on the web using a paywall model (although all the evidence so far suggests that unless you’re delivering either pornography or very highly targeted, valuable information towards business users, you probably can’t). But I am curious about what ManCon loyalists think of being charged money for something that was previously valued at zero. Bizarrely, a review of Papa G’s in the Printworks from ten days ago is now trapped behind a paywall, although if I Google it, I can find the exact same review for free. It’s hardly going to have me reaching for the credit card, is it?

And while the reviews are very detailed and well written by proper journalists and all that, does anyone, when it comes down to it, really care? If I want an idea of whether a pizza place is any good, I can either use a free review site like ViewManchester, or I’ll possibly risk eight quid by, y’know, going in there and ordering a pizza.

ManCon has done a very good job of convincing people to part with their cash in advance of its relaunch, raising at least £60k from subscribers. The crunch will come in a year’s time when these people will be forced to consider whether renewal is worth it.

The growth of a beard obviously signifies a psychological problem within the wearer. Not my words, you understand, but those of former England football manager and beard expert Graham Taylor, who thinks people who “grow beards for no reason” are undergoing some kind of ongoing, possibly catastrophic, mood change.

Taylor was talking about Roy Keane, who grew a chinful of obscenely Santa-ish facial hair immediately before quitting as manager of Sunderland at the end of 2008. But it might be worth pondering his analysis in relation to poor Adrian Chiles (42), who looks more and more fed up by the day on BBC1’s The One Show. Nobody exactly knows what’s going on but he appears to have become moderately repulsed by co-host Christine Bleakley (30), who is said to be engaged in some kind of personal bedroom arrangement with pie-eating Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard (32). (The ages in brackets signify my pathetic nod towards celebrity journalism.)

As Marple Leaf summed up on Twitter last night:

That scruffy yam on #motd can’t mention Lampard. Just knicked his bird.

Meanwhile Robin Brown has meticulously compiled an entertaining list of descriptions of Chiles’ beard, including my own observation that it makes him look like

the violent alcoholic captain of a Victorian steamship.

I strongly advise you to go and look at it right now.

Steve Penk is a man whose career has followed the trajectory of Alan Partridge. Having started on local radio, he somehow lands a gig on prime time TV before it all goes horribly wrong and he’s forced to return to local radio. In Penk’s case the story is especially pathetic, since he had to buy and subsequently ruin a much-loved indie station in order to get himself employed as a breakfast DJ playing MOR crap .

All that might sound a bit mean-spirited. And of course, it is. But it’s nothing when compared with Penk’s stunt last Thursday morning, in which he played Van Halen’s Jump after hearing that a woman had caused traffic “chaos” by threatening to jump off a bridge above the M60. According to the DJ:

On Thursday [14 January 2010] a regular listener, we’ll call him ‘Bob’, (because that’s his name!), was seething with frustration because, along with thousands of other ordinary people, his daily routine had been completely wrecked. The entire area had been thrown into total chaos by the inexplicable actions of a single, troubled woman.

Bob texted me to request the classic rock track ‘Jump’ by Van Halen and, after careful consideration, I decided to play it because I knew it would send out a clear signal of ‘empathy’ to all those gridlocked drivers who were going to be late for work, school, a hospital appointment, etc. through no fault of their own.

You’ll find that wankers tend to use the phrase “total chaos” to describe a traffic jam and Penk is no exception.

In the event, the “troubled woman” did as Van Halen suggested by quite literally “jumping” off the bridge (this is how Sky News reported it), leaving Penk with an obvious moral victory over the senseless, selfish actions of one of the most gravely distressed members of his local community. Way to go Steve!

No, but seriously, Penk was suitably contrite over his decision:

I was, of course, very sorry to hear that the lady had subsequently jumped from the bridge but relieved that her injuries were minor.

If, as has been suggested, the woman jumped because she heard the song from a passing car radio that’s unfortunate but I don’t regret playing it for a minute.

And now, here’s a couple of extracts from the Ofcom broadcasting code:

2.4 Programmes must not include material (whether in individual programmes or in programmes taken together) which, taking into account the context, condones or glamorises violent, dangerous or seriously antisocial behaviour and is likely to encourage others to copy such behaviour. (See Rules 1.11 to 1.13 in Section One: Protecting the Under-Eighteens.)

2.5 Methods of suicide and self-harm must not be included in programmes except where they are editorially justified and are also justified by the context. (See Rule 1.13 in Section One: Protecting the Under-Eighteens.)

It’d be a shame, wouldn’t it, if Penk’s radio station received a really massive Ofcom fine?

Hello, all. You may have noticed I haven’t updated this blog for a fair while. This is thanks mainly to a combination of it being Christmas, going on holiday, and having lots of other fabulously exciting things to do.

However, I became conscious that my regular reader would be missing me, so I invited, via the medium of Twitter, people to suggest things for me to write about to get me back in the swing of shit. Out of the literally hundreds of replies (or “at (@) replies”, to use the parlance of our times), I selected the suggestion of Fat Roland, whose words were exactly these:

“If you post a top ten(ish) favourite electronic music tracks / albums, I’ll link it from my blog.”

He didn’t put a smiley face on the end, thank God, or I would have immediately unfollowed him. Having accepted the challenge, I immediately realised that I have no real idea how to write about electronic music, tending, as I do, to write about other things almost all the time. And I also felt intimidated by Fat’s words, namely, to quote him:

“I’ll link it from my blog.”

Fat, in case you don’t know, is the über-lord of electronic music blogging. As such, I have spent the last 24 hours in a frenzy (often tearful), writing pages of drivel about each of the ten (ish) tracks I selected, before having to tear it up and start again, such was the inadequacy of my prose. In the end, I couldn’t go on, so I felt I had to enlist the help of legendary music journalist Gary Frotter (46), who worked on Muzik back in the “day”. He assisted me in coming up with some superb one-line descriptions for each track, which I reproduce below:

1. Baby Ford and the I-Fach Machine – Bad Friday

“Minimal echoey trance that sounds like someone throwing a set of magnetised woks at a giant radiator. In York Minster.”

2. Polygon Window – unnamed

“Squelchier than a combine harvester driving over a bouncy castle filled with worms.”

3. Speedy J – Kreck

“Rib-fracturingly hard techno.”

4. Moderat – Seamonkey

“Ultra modern like dubstep or some shit, kind of thing.”

5. Leftfield – Space Shanty

“Bubbly, yet banging. Like a partly-melted Aero, inside a kick drum, floating in a bowl of hydrochloric acid.”

6. Mike Flowers Pops – Debase (Soft Palate)

“More sym(cym)bols(bals) than a Dan Brown novel(12″).” [Not sure I quite understand that one - DQ]

7. Daniel Savio – Monkey P M P (video below)

“Literally indescribable. Like a condom half-filled with lumpy custard being flung at a Siamese cat as Alan Titchmarsh looks on.”

8. Lee van Dowski and Quennum – Lust Part 2

“Theme choon from a Venusian version of High Noon.”

9. Gui Boratto  - Arquipélago

“If this is Brazilian (which it is) then I want a Brazilian (wax)!”

10. Gow – Nipperkin Noodle

“Proto-industrial acid house with a moderate air of brotherly indecision.”

11. The Field – A Paw in My Face

“Lionel Richie trapped inside a photocopier with only a vial of liquid ecstasy and a mild brain tumour for company. And that’s my kind of party.”

That’s it, Fat. I hereby claim my link.

(Damn. Forgot about Flat Beat by Mr Oizo.)

It’s that time of year when a list of some sort becomes very much the order of the day. I also recently realised that virtually all people on television are deeply awful. Bearing these things in mind, I’ve come up with my top 10 most awful people on television 2009. In reverse order, natch.

10. Garth Crooks - Garth kicks off the awfulness countdown thanks to a tetchy style that manages to put everyone on edge without him realising it. One of the staunchest defenders of Emmannuel Adebayor’s repulsive behaviour against Arsenal earlier this year, his often mystifying outbursts on the BBC’s Final Score are excellent news for Sky Sports.

9. Richard Hammond – While Clarkson remains Top Gear’s most obvious bellend, Hammond is clearly encroaching on the territory with his big 80s hair, silly wardrobe and car-related orgasms. Shit advert bonus: Morrisons

8. Amanda Holden – Not only did Holden display remarkable dislikeability as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, she also starred in Big Top, a BBC1 sitcom that had unintentional similarities to Ricky Gervais’ deliberately unfunny When the Whistle Blows.

7. Davina McCall – With each passing year, McCall’s twitchy, arm-waving presenting style appears to morph into a caricature of itself. Awfulness arises most obviously as she feigns interest in an annual television event that almost everyone got bored of some years ago. Soon to be appearing on Sky 1. Obviously. Shit advert bonus: L’Oreal

6. Ant and/or Dec – Smirking Geordie ballbags Ant and Dec’s continued appearance on I’m A Celebrity… is beginning to feel deeply uncomfortable. I can’t be the only person who wonders why these two giggling relics from 1990s kids’ TV are mysteriously bestowed the status of royalty while the so-called non-entities they laugh at on a nightly basis during their once-a-year presenting gig must swallow kangaroo semen in order to get on the box. Shit advert bonus: Nintendo Wii

5. Kirstie Allsopp – The awful thing about Kirstie is that she is still on television, hanging around like a bad smell from the height of 2004’s property boom that just won’t clear, yet seemingly unaware of the part she played in turning the nation into a nosey, jealous, over-mortgaged mess. Unfortunately, she appears to be branching out as both a Tory “adviser” on jolly hockey sticks and girly domestic Goddess. Her infuriatingly upper-class Christmas country crafts programme was a contender for 2009’s televisual nadir.

4. Gok Wan – As has been previously observed on this blog, Gok has invented his own language, much of which revolves around the use of his own name. While his “Gokettes” don’t seem to care, one can’t help but feel the practice exhibits an ego run out of control. Clearly I’m not a woman, so I can’t begin to understand how being hollered at by Gok and paraded naked on stage in a provincial shopping centre is going to cure my raging insecurities. Also responsible for making lots of middle-aged women think stupidly coloured, angular plastic-framed glasses make them look younger.

3. Noel Edmonds – Badly dressed cosmic nutcase Noel’s demented outburst in the direction of  Wealdon district council earlier this year, part of which involved him revealing that he wasn’t being paid for his time as a presenter on Sky 1, was probably the year’s most awful TV moment and hinted at Alan Partridge made real. Edmonds likes to whinge about barmy bureaucrats, health and safety legislation and “political correctness gone mad” while illegally driving his own black cab down bus lanes in a weird protest against “time thieves”. The word awful hardly scratches the surface of the bearded libertarian tossbag’s inherent unpleasantness.

2. Tim Lovejoy – Lovejoy’s voice, which somehow manages to be simultaneously bland, whiny and cocky, his lumpen, somnambulist presenting style, his awkwardness around guests and co-hosts, his shallowness (thinks the Glazers are great for football, says Johan Cruyff is his favourite footballer despite only having seen one five-second clip, etc), his love of Chelsea and boring indie music, his pointy shoes/tight cardigan combos and just about every other facet of his personality and appearance takes him to number two in the awfulness league. Something for the Weekend is generally unwatchable at best but Lovejoy’s farcically awkward weekly gadget review segment is clearly the most horrific thing to have been seen on weekend morning television since someone accidentally set Gordon the Gopher on fire.

1. Michael McIntyre – The personification of the risk-averse post-Brand/Ross TV comedy landscape, McIntyre is helping to strangle the art of stand-up with his nicey-nicey observational style that essentially comprises saying something bland that isn’t remotely funny in an exaggerated plummy voice. For this, he was rewarded in 2009 with a BBC TV series that saw him traverse the country making bland, not remotely funny observations about different towns in an exaggerated plummy voice. Comedian Stewart Lee recently joked that his next project would be to rehash McIntyre’s entire routine verbatim, “just to see if I could inject any paranoia and menace or even personality into it, if I could turn the blandness of it into the thoughts of someone on the very edge of madness”. Even Vic and Bob think he’s shit. There can be no redemption for the Godforsaken McIntyre, truly the most awful person on television of 2009.

Feel free to add your own to the list. NB: The following have been discounted as too obvious to mention: Jeremy Kyle, Jamie Oliver, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson. So don’t even. Go there. Anyone thinking of leaving a comment defending Lovejoy can also f*** off.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to pay for an ID card. £30 for the privilege of owning a little pink bit of plastic that has the same basic purpose as a passport – while at the same time handing over your fingerprints to the government – holds absolutely no appeal. Nor should it to anyone with even the mildest sense of curiosity about whether this “voluntary” scheme may, in one way or another, represent the thin end of Big Brother’s wedge. (The fact that the scheme is a complete waste of money that will do nothing to help towards the government’s originally stated goal of stopping terrorism is by the by.)

One would expect that a journalist might possess a modicum of scepticism about such issues. So it was with some bafflement that I heard on Radio 4 the other week that the first person to get one of the new cards was Angela Epstein, a freelance hack who writes a column for the Manchester Evening News.

In her MEN column last Thursday, she wrote:

I’M so proud I could almost burst. I haven’t felt this good about cradling something small and pink since my daughter Sophie was born.

All right, so I’m exaggerating a bit. But honestly, when you’re the first member of the public to be issued with a brand spanking new national identity card, it’s a seminal moment.

Getting to the front of the queue was a reward by the Home Office for Epstein’s decision to use her column as a “platform” to “venture encouraging opinions” on the ID cards scheme (her words). The remainder of the column reads like a government information leaflet, extolling the virtues of ID cards and detailing the whole tedious process of getting one. Embarrassingly, there is even a confession about the sense of self-validation Epstein felt after pocketing her “piece of history”, while the “if you’re a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide” line is senselessly barfed on to the page with the rest of it.

I’m a sad, lonely blogger and clearly have no chance of rising to the dizzy heights of writing a column of such penetrating brilliance for a newspaper like the MEN. As such, I’m a bit lost for words. Luckily, the commenters on the MEN’s website are a little more on the ball:

Airhead, silly, unintelligent and vacuous are the words that sprang to mind regarding the article. If this is an example of the journalism in the MEN then I have to say you have a problem. This is NOT what I expect regarding the important topic of ID cards from a ’serious’ local paper. To be honest, I’m flabbergasted that it was published. It lets you down badly and the less we read of Ms. Epstien’s ‘opinions’ the very much better. If this is your seminal moment, Ms. Epstein, then I really pity you.