Foopball, foopball, ra, ra, ra

In the wake of the coverage of Andy Gray/Richard Keys, I had  a blog post floating round my head yesterday about the  crushing ubiquity of football and the culture that surrounds it.    Had I got round to writing it,  it would have made some of the points made by Catherine Bennett  in her piece for today’s Observer Forget getting rid of sexism in sport.  Let’s get rid of sport:  an end to the blokey horror if it all, say I, to the absolute  inescapableness of it, to the obscenity of the money (pretty much any story in the Observer’s Said and Done column most weeks is enough to make you want to ban the game completely), to the new social necessity of following a team.

I blame Rupert Murdoch, for enabling the Topsy-ish growth of the Premier League, and Nick Hornby , whose   Fever Pitch made it socially acceptable for football to spread beyond the back pages, wheedling its way into every part of daily life like honey fungus.

Bennett makes another good point in her piece about the pervasiveness of sports chatter in the media: the low percentage of women and girls who enjoy the competitive nature of team games: 

the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation finds that 36% of women “enjoy the competitiveness of sport”, as opposed to 61% of men. Why, then… should the sport-averse be subjected to extended sessions of compulsory sport, as if they were still in class, forced out into the mud to contemplate the skills of the school elite? 

Good point.  And why, if this is the case, are the government so keen to promote competitive sport in schools at the same time as they cut School Sports Partnerships to the detriment of sports that girls might actually enjoy?  I played lots of competitive sport at school – netball, hockey, rounders for the school, a county trial for hockey.  All at the point of my PE teacher’s gun.  I hated every minute and gave up sport as soon as I could, only to rediscover the pleasures of exercise years later when – by then pretty unfit – I joined a gym. 

Professional sport is entertaining enough to watch,  but it isn’t important.  I do  not feel it will be a national disgrace if “our medal tally” is worse at the London Olympics than it was in Beijing.  I do not care that ‘we’ are unlikely to win the World Cup again in my lifetime.  I was delighted about the Ashes, but no-one would have died if England had lost.  Sport, like most other things in life, is more fun to do yourself than watch someone else do.   Can we get a bit of perspective back please? 

The importance of ignoring economists

One of my already broken new year’s resolutions was to stop worrying about the economy.  This is on the grounds that I’m occupied pretty full-time worrying about things  in my own life that I can at least hope to change, without putting in extra hours fretting about things that  are beyond my control.

It’s quite hard not to worry about UKPlc’s GDP, though, especially if you’re woken every morning  by the massed doom-mongers of the Today programme (I loved  Chris Addison’s description of Today this weekend as: “Grumpy Old Men without jokes. If Today had a face it would look like Walter Matthau sucking a lemon”, and so it would)

So, when I am overwhelmed by the looming disasters and scary predictions about interest rates being peddled by Humphrys et al, I will try to remember this:

The future  performance of the economy, the passage from good times to recession or depression and back, cannot be foretold.  There are more than ample predictions but no firm knowledge.  All contend with a diverse combination of uncertain government action, unknown corporate and individual behaviour and, in the larger world, with peace or war.  Also with unforeseen technological and other innovations and consumer and investment responses.  There is the variable effect of exports, imports, capital movements and corporate, public and government reaction thereto.  Thus the all too evident fact: the combined result of the unknown cannot be known.

That’s JK Galbraith , who knew what he was talking about, on economists.   He seems to agree with my friend Philomene - although in rather more thoughtful language.  “Economics a science?” she once screeched at me in  disbelief.  “Witchcraft is more scientific!”

Where’s the audience for local TV?

Thank God I got round to finding out about local politics in Tower Hamlets. It’s  Dallas meets the Borgias with Oyster cards round here.

New readers wanting to catch up with a story of political double-crossing, conspiracy theories about religious fundamentalism,  suspicions of electoral fraud and  backroom deals in smokefree rooms can start here.  Those with a taste for a more analytical take on it all can pick it up here. 

With such rich source material a local TV station broadcasting news about the area should be a hit – there’s a  news programme /soap opera combo just begging to be produced already.   But, even in Tower Hamlets, I fail to see  local TV of the type Jeremy Hunt was proposing on the Today programme this morning taking off. 

As he explains it, the market has failed to give us a truly plural local media so he proposes to stimulate the market by relaxing ownership restrictions and allowing media companies to start hyper-local TV services to fill the gap.  

He gave some examples of where local interest might be strong enough to make programming worthwhile.  It won’t fill a schedule, but, yes, football fans in Bolton may well want coverage of their team’s performance against Man Utd  (as long as ESPN/Sky/MUTV are prepared to share the rights – and Wanderers fans don’t already have access to the BBC, the internet or a newspaper).  People in Middlesborough may  want to see their Mayoral debates televised – a bit more of a stretch this one, but I can see the public interest argument for giving them the chance;  but it’s hardly going to be stripped through a week’s programming at 7pm – and if there isn’t a regular local channel for people to go to, how will they find it when it’s on?  

It  may be a massive failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t see where the audience demand is for these services, or what the business model for a local TV service might be.  The  obvious conclusion is that creative use of the internet is the best way to achieve the  kind of services that Jeremy Hunt has in mind – a conclusion he seems to be reaching himself, if this speech is anything to go by.  Odd that he didn’t try to share this with us on Today.

Bigotry and outrage

Turned the Today programme off, violently, at ten past eight this morning, but not before shouting things at James Naughtie that, had they been picked up on Sky, I would certainly have had to apologise for.

I lost it when Naughtie said that, by agreeing to the leaders’ debates, Gordon Brown made the election camapaign into a personality contest so must accept it when his personality becomes the story of the day.  The idea that the media have been diligently following policy issues for years until being forced to talk about personalities by the sight of politicians debating in public is as hilarious as it’s infuriating.  The papers have been desperate for something like this to happen to liven things up. They’ve finally got the gaffe they’ve been waiting for.  Watch them make the most of it.

The people have shrugged – the bastards

Came away from last night’s programme about reconnecting people with politics sadly disappointed that as an electorate we are badly failing our MPs.  It’s a wonder they can find the will to carry on. 

We don’t go to their meetings (possibly because when we do we get harangued about doubting their integrity).  We don’t vote. We don’t respond to their blogs – although that side of the experiment seemed to die as soon as it was born and, as any fule kno, these things take time.  Not even Chris Brogan could build a vibrant blog community in a few weeks.   (And is anyone else as irritated as I am with the number of MPs who just use Twitter as an advertising channel for their activities?  Tom Harris, an MP who knows how to do these things, had a great blog post a while back with top tips for political tweeting which started with : 1. Don’t just broadcast – engage. Politicians who use social media to let everyone know what they think but who don’t even respond to others’ views are doing themselves no favours.  Quite right too.)

Anyway, back to last night’s MPs.    According to Ann Widdecombe we don’t even care enough to tell them what it is we don’t like so they can do something about it. (“They just shrug… I’ve been facing it for years… The shrug“)

Well, Mark Oaten found plenty of things we seem to think and not like about politicians, (“boring, egotistic, in it for what they can get, useless, lying, deceitful, full of waffle…”)perhaps they could start by addressing those, and realising one of the basic rules of communications – it’s not your audience’s fault if your message isn’t getting through.

Admittedly it’s hard to reflect the reality of several weeks’ events in one hour-long programme and perhaps the MPs were just badly served in the edit suite.  And I do have sympathy with MPs  (some of my best friends…) who on the whole work incredibly hard for little thanks on some intransigent social problems and seem genuinely motivated by a desire to do good.  At the moment they do seem pretty unhappy with their lot, as they fight against a corrosively cynical press and a strange uncertainty about their role.  In our highly centralised, party-dominated, control-freaky political system what is a backbench MP for?  Legislator? Holder of government to account? Lobby fodder? Social worker?  Maybe that’s the question they should be trying to answer, before they start worrying about why we aren’t engaging with them.

Why don’t you…

The infallibly interesting Seth Godin has a post today about why he doesn’t watch TV any more and lists all of the things you can do instead, now that there’s so much more choice of things to do in your spare time.  I was struck by the fact that all but a couple of his “new” choices have existed for years – I admit that running a store on eBay or starting up an online community do depend on a degree of 21st century connectivity, but most of the others are just slight variations on things my mother used to tell me to do when I was loafing around the house as a teenager and she thought I should be doing something more productive.  (This might mean my mum is a visionary marketing guru who was  years ahead of her time, but I doubt it.)

I don’t watch a lot of TV when it’s broadcast now because I’m working/my kids monopolise the remote in the early evenings and there’s only so much Hannah Montana a grown woman can take (Phineas and Ferb is good, though)/I’d rather read a good book/I watch stuff I like on DVD when I can watch it in satisfyingly long chunks rather than rationed and with adverts an hour a week.  But most importantly because I don’t find most of what’s on that interesting.   Even when I worked in TV ten years ago it was clear that the really creative, bright young things were gravitating much more towards what might be possible online than what could be done in a TV studio.  So not only is TV suffering from an increase in competition for its audience’s time, for me at least, it’s also suffering from a lack of  really strong content to fight back with.  So, all together now, why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?

Saving the world one click at a time

Fllickr: Sean Stayte

 I’ve received several requests to sign online petitions to Save the BBC.  The petitioners seem to think that any cut to the BBC is an absolute outrage to be resisted until death – even if it is being proposed by the BBC itself, which does have a vested interest in its own survival.   In classic BBC fashion, they seem to have chosen the wrong things to cut – the good bits that the market isn’t  providing – but I can’t see that it’s wrong to admit that the BBC can’t do everything and scale back.  A pre-emptive strike against cuts being imposed from outside, perhaps? (And personally I hate and rarely use the BBC website, so big, so bland, so smug.  It should have been pruned years ago).

I haven’t signed the petitions, although I love the BBC for all its faults.  It’s the fizzing outrage of the emails that puts me off.  There’s no nuance in the argument, no recognition that there may be more than one side to be considered.  At least one of the organisations that petitions me for support, regularly asks for suggestions as to what I want them to protest about next.  It’s  as though it’s the  act of complaining that’s important,  the opportunity to vent about everything that’s wrong in the world, rather than doing the difficult and often dull work of bringing about real change.   A classic armchair warrior, I’ve clicked yes to petitions for Amnesty, Reprieve and Friends of the Earth,  pro-democracy in Burma, anti-homophobia in Uganda and  lots more that I can’t remember.  What happens to it all?  Is this real democracy in action, or  knee-jerk populism?  And, as one post on the Guardian’s 6Music story remarked, is it just me, or are Facebook and Twitter now running the country?

Nostalgia and armadillos

 Stewart Lee ranted about modern TV and in particular the current state of Channel 4 (a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home) on his show a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I have been nostalgic for the days when I worked at C4 and we did good stuff.  Arts programmes about the arts, that made you think ; documentaries that changed the law , added to the gaiety of the nation, and that were fought over in court. 

Of course, it might  be that Channel 4 is just the same rag bag of good stuff and tripe that it always was and what I’m really nostalgic for is being 27 again.  But what the hell.  It’s my birthday and I’m allowed to have the odd madeleine moment about TV  programmes of the 1990s if I want. So, in the spirit of nostalgia, here’s a tribute to the only armadillo in history known to have introduced an arts programme (and subsequently to have died of a broken heart). 

I Would Gladly Sell My House and All of Its Contents *

There is currently yet another campaign urging non-payment of the BBC licence fee going on with about 200,000 signed up so far.  A range of opponents of the BBC have been energised by Ross/Brand  to rage  against the broadcaster, which remains one of the  few  world class organisations the country still has.  As an ex-BBC staffer I’ve heard all the arguments against the Beeb, but it still seems to me that the arguments in favour are much, much stronger.  If you want to hear them rehearsed (with jokes), Stephen Fry does it extremely elegantly in podcast-form on his site. 

The BBC itself supplied one of  the best anti-moral-majority -outrage arguments  ever.  Perhaps the fact that I saw this   at an impressionable age is what made me the woman I am today. 

Happy Christmas one and all, and let’s raise a glass to the ghost of Desiree Carthorse, who clearly still stalks the land.

* 

Sledgehammer, meet nut

The BBC is currently giving us a  master class in how not to handle a PR crisis, marks should be awarded for (lack of) style, grace or  basic competence.  I can’t help feeling though that, yes Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s comments were crass and stupid.  And no, it’s not big or clever to leave offensive nuisance calls on someone’s answerphone.  And yes, indeed, they are both over-paid, overgrown school boys who aren’t as funny as they think they are and should think about the responsibility that goes with taking public money.  BUT do we really need questions in the House, a Prime Ministerial statement and some spluttering from David Cameron to highlight how terribly serious it all is?  The media response seems to me to be completely out of all proportion and is feeding the outrage – the number of complaints was pretty insignificant until the papers and the politicians jumped onto the bandwagon.  I was researching some stuff for a presentation I’m doing later in the week and came across this, which made me laugh out loud in recognition of today’s papers.  “I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous.  He or she is like a person who has just put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae”.