I don’t know what it means but Brooker is a very credible source and the title sounds very Curtis-like. The title is the same as a poem by Richard Brautigan, which begins:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

So it’s almost certainly going to be something about how computers are impacting upon – and perhaps dominating – the human experience (I’m guessing not in a good way). Brooker also mentions that Twitter will feature in the series, which perhaps points to themes around the broadening of the private life into the public/digital sphere. I’m betting Jeremy Bentham’s theory of the Panoptican crops up somewhere.

Brautigan committed suicide in 1984, at the age of 49, by shooting himself in the head. This tends towards the sort of mysterious characters and violent events Curtis favours as a way into his films. Most recently, It Felt Like A Kiss exhibited a fascination with both Rock Hudson and the assassination of JFK. It also used a literary work to suggest an underlying tone – in that case Philip K Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint.

The concept of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), meaning an integration of human-computer interaction into everyday objects and activities, perceived by some as a natural evolution of the world wide web, would seem to be at the centre of the series. The same title crops up on this article on the concept of ubicomp from 2004.

Admittedly this is all pure speculation until Curtis says more on his website, which is probably worth keeping an eye on.

It strikes me that banter has changed. It once involved elements of wit and intelligence, perhaps the odd pun and vague bit of innuendo. You can sort of imagine Oscar Wilde engaging in it. But banter has recently been adopted by a sub-class of moron and appropriated to cover anything groups of men talk about that could loosely be described as mean-spirited, heavy-handed, dull, obvious, bullying, narrow-minded and/or any combination of the above.

This week banter has lost all sense of itself as a concept. Banter now exists solely as an excuse; a defence wheeled out by apologists to cover for the misguided utterances of twats. I’m not thinking of anyone in particular and certainly wouldn’t name them here. But the outpourings of hairy-handed balls enthusiast Richard Keys appeal to this definition.

Poor Richard. If you watch the clip it seems perfectly obvious he is the weakling in the group. The non-sportsman, reduced to impressing the jocks with what he imagines to be “tough talk”, referring to a woman as “it” and espousing bizarre sexual imagery. (Although when he refers to Jamie Redknapp “hanging out the back of it”, I can’t help but envision of some kind of slapstick encounter involving a faulty catch on the rear doors of a Transit van.) Perhaps in a pub or a private setting such comments, although grim and offensive, should not have been enough to cost him his job. But in the workplace, there can be very little sympathy for Keys’ fate.

Banter, in its modern form, seems to have found a particular home among footballers and goes hand-in-hand with conversational narcissism. I recently followed Darren Huckerby on Twitter (he followed me first and curiosity got the better of me) and was thrilled to receive an auto-DM from the erstwhile Norwich City forward expressing his hope that I would “enjoy his banter”. This confused me, since I always thought banter was supposed to be a two-way street. The implication that banter can be owned by a single person perhaps sums up what has gone so very terribly wrong.

Since everyone seems to “enjoy banter” except me, it’s tempting to conclude that I’m humourless, wussy, or both. So I was gratified to find that another adult male I mentioned the Huckerby thing to respond with the phrase “banter my arse”. Another chum suggested that banter is “always used by people who aren’t funny”. So, you see, it’s not just me who thinks banter is bollocks.

Apparently Keys and Andy Gray are now being lined up for jobs in Qatar – a country that is well known for its progressive approach to women’s rights. May they, and banter, rest in peace.

Albums

1. Hot Chip – One Life Stand

2.Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers

3. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

4. Brian Eno – Small Craft on a Milk Sea

5. Four Tet – There is Love in You

The Hot Chip album is easily their most cohesive effort to date and takes the winner’s medal for being chock full of stuff that is catchy, clever and, occasionally, wildly romantic. In case you hadn’t realised, these things, in the right combination, almost always make for great pop music and Hot Chip have lined everything up quite majestically. The Mount Kimbie record got me really quite excited for its dislocated bumpy beats (I’ll avoid the word dubstep) – Fat Roland does a better job than I ever could of explaining why it’s great here. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs is a similarly coherent album that contains, as usual, a couple of outstanding songs (Sprawl II is vigorously excellent) as well as a lot of very good ones. Eno not only because it’s Eno but also because it’s good and Four Tet for being nicely, and surprisingly, housey.

Books

1. Jonathan Franzen – Freedom

2. Dave Eggers – Zeitoun

I didn’t read that many books that were released this year, hence only a top two. Freedom is outstanding and you can see how it took Franzen about 400 years to write it. I can’t remember reading a novel where each sentence is so carefully thought out and each page is so densely packed with brilliant prose. Zeitoun is incredibly moving and is easily as engrossing a work of narrative non-fiction as Capote’s In Cold Blood. I’m just starting Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, which might get better but at the moment I can’t imagine it will top these two.

Films

1. Inception

2. Monsters

3. The Social Network

4. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

5. Rec 2

I know it’s a bit low-brow and predictable to select a massive blockbuster as my favourite film of the year but Inception is an exquisite movie, executed brilliantly, that manages to retain a completely satisfying narrative logic and is hugely entertaining for the entirety of its 142 minutes. The conclusion, in particular, is beautifully economical while managing to be emotionally and intellectually rich. Monsters, an ultra-low budget (£500k) semi-improvised road movie – with aliens – really surprised me and is a genuinely remarkable filmmaking achievement. The Social Network is Aaron Sorkin at the absolute peak of his powers, managing to create an engrossing drama from what, on the surface, looks like the most meagre of real-life material. Bad Lieutenant, narratively a fairly bog standard, hard-boiled police caper, benefits hugely from rampant Herzogian hysterics, while Rec 2 was inventively shot and constructed, elegantly concise… and full of demonic zombies.

Television

1. Mad Men (Season Four)

2. Wounded

3. The Trip

4. Welcome to Lagos

Mad Men continues to be extremely enthralling for all the reasons it always has been. The writing is as sharp as ever, the characters continue to evolve in interesting ways and there’s still that ever-present, darkly tense undercurrent, which makes the outcome of each episode pretty much impossible to predict. Wounded was a stunning one-off documentary about the rehabilitation of soldiers who had lost limbs in combat and is as moving a TV programme as I can ever remember. The Trip started a bit shakily but evolved into something rather deep, poetic and manly, as well as looking stunning. The three-part Welcome To Lagos was a true feat of documentary access that opened your eyes to a hidden world.

I’ve probably missed something obvious. Feel free to comment below.

But regardless of all of that, I find it difficult to understand why the BBC’s Question Time has decided to include him on the panel tonight for the fourth time this year. MacKenzie was on the programme on January 14, March 11 and June 3. Add in tonight’s appearance and that will be four programmes out of 41 in 2010 – or as near as damn it 10% of all the Question Times so far this year. (This is in addition to his regular appearances on This Week, Newsnight, the Daily Politics and various other BBC news and politics programmes.)

What dirt does MacKenzie have on the makers of Question Time that causes them to keep inviting him back? It can’t be that the viewing figures shoot up whenever he’s on – in addition to pissing off everyone in Liverpool, everyone in Scotland thinks he’s a prick as well. Perhaps his erudition and debating skills make him indispensable. Yes. That must be it.

Of course there has to – and should – be a spread of political views on Question Time. That’s the point of it, and the fact is that Kelvin MacKenzie represents the views of lots of people who read the Sun newspaper. But four times? In a single year? Isn’t that a bit much?

As someone who can’t really be doing with McIntyre’s brand of trite observational “humour”, I am, according to the Guardian yesterday, a cultural snob. The fact that McIntyre has never once made me so much as smile, let alone laugh, is apparently irrelevant. One must, it is argued, accept McIntyre as funny because his mainstream appeal is vaguely “good for comedy”.

I disagree. I think a man being lauded as a comic genius for saying things like “Have you noticed how Weetabix goes soggy when you put milk on it” is actually an unarguable cultural travesty.

Still, Homer Simpson would probably disagree:

Elsewhere in today’s news, it has been revealed that Charlie Brooker (who clearly regularly mines by blog and Twitter stream for inspiration) intends to marry former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq. Brooker’s involvement in this C-list celebrity story brought out the worst in users of the allegedly popular social networking tool. He maintains massive cuddleability among that certain brand of free-thinking, straight-talking, pathetic, greying liberal comedy wannabes who populate Twitter, meaning Huq’s name quickly started to trend. But might I offer the following tip to Brooker fans: If you want him to like you, and you obviously do, it’s probably best not to do what I saw someone do earlier, which is to call his wife-to-be a whore. Especially if you mention @charltonbrooker in the tweet.

And James Corden. Something to do with James Corden. You’ll have to Google it.

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.

]]> http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/02/09/nicky-campbell-lol/feed/ 2 http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/01/18/adrian-chiles-beard-and-the-psychological-observations-of-graham-taylor/ http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/01/18/adrian-chiles-beard-and-the-psychological-observations-of-graham-taylor/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:34:35 +0000 David Quinn http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/?p=576 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.

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.

“For 50% off home insurance call us now!” – Stephen Fry

Wonderfully engaging stuff from the Direct Line home insurance ad.

“Plus, a thousand pounds’ worth of pet food to be won every week!” – Stephen Fry

A remarkable, seminal line from the deeply influential Direct Line pet insurance ad.

“You’re never sure of the best deal until you come to us direct!” – Stephen Fry

Another terifically entertaining line from the Direct Line pet insurance ad. Here, Fry illustrates clearly his Renaissance man credentials.

“You won’t find our deals on price comparison sites so we can give you savings!” – Stephen Fry

Powerful, sublime work, from the much admired Direct Line “Car Insurance Calendar” ad

“Right now, you can get twelve months’ cover for the price of ten!”  – Stephen Fry

A wonderful piece of delivery from the extraordinary Direct Line car insurance ad. One reviewer, YouTube user Clubby231, said of this: “My 7-year-old loves this advert.” I think this is something with which we can all agree.

I may have missed some off but I think this give’s a flavour of Fry’s unique contribution to British public life.

Next week: Celebrated quotes from Aleksandr, founder of ComparetheMeerkat.com